Life in the Balance: My Journey With Breast Cancer.

By Dr. Marla Shapiro

This book is an intimate and candid journey through breast cancer by one of this country’s most respected physicians.

Dr. Marla Shapiro is a medical consultant for CTV News, host of Balance: Television for Living Well and a health columnist for The Globe and Mail. “Dr. Marla,” as she is known, seemed to have it all. But on Friday, August 13, 2004, Marla Shapiro found out she had invasive breast cancer. Like the more than 20,000 Canadian women diagnosed with the disease every year, her world changed forever. But unlike most, she had an insider’s knowledge of the disease and treatments.

Life in the Balance is Dr. Shapiro’s intimate, inspiring and often surprising account of her illness, from the shock of the initial diagnosis to multiple surgeries, chemotherapy and her agonizing decision to have both breasts removed. She candidly recounts her struggle going from the woman who routinely delivered all the right answers to her patients to the woman who quickly discovered there were no right answers when it came to her own life-altering decisions.

You can read an excerpt of Dr. Shapiro’s book in the January 2007 issue of Reader’s Digest, where it is featured as the Book Choice.

(Life in the Balance, copyright © 2006 by Marla Shapiro Inc. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.)