This Is Your Brain On Chemo: A Mind Lost and Found After Cancer Treatment

“This is Your Brain on Chemo is a guide to mental, physical, and emotional survival of cancer treatment’s shadow world—chemotherapy’s damage to memory and mental capacity. Carolyn Stack brings the reader into this harrowing world with a novelist’s eye for emotional detail and a physician’s understanding of its causes.”
—Thomas H. McNeely, author of Ghost Horse and Pictures of the Shark

A year after undergoing harrowing treatment for metastatic cancer, Dr. Carolyn Stack recognized the severity of her cognitive and emotional limitations. She could no longer focus on reading, engage in a conversation with her partner, or follow the plot of a TV show. Worse, she had lost her sense of self as a vital, intelligent, productive partner, friend, and clinical psychologist/psychoanalyst. In her quest to understand what had happened to her, the author discovered that research on chemo brain was still in its infancy and that personal accounts of living with this condition barely existed. She became determined to write the book she wished had been available during the worst of her disability.

The result is a fascinating weave of her experience coping with devastating cognitive and emotional losses, tales from other cancer survivors, summaries of current scientific research, social commentary, and potential remedies.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carolyn Stack, PSY.D is a co-editor (with Lynne Layton, PH.D) of Bringing the Plague: Towards a Postmodern Psychoanalysis. She is a psychologist/psychoanalyst who practiced in Cambridge, MA for over three decades.