02353cam a2200325 i 4500 1390580803 TxAuBib 20240731120000.0 240426s2024||||||||||||||||||||||||eng|u 2024013723 9781891011627 HRD 27.95 1891011626 HRD 27.95 TxAuBib rda Pfeffer, Gila, author. Nearly departed [BOOK] : adventures in loss, cancer, and other inconveniences : a memoir / Gila Pfeffer. New York : The Experiment, [2024] 258 pages ; 22 cm. txt rdacontent n rdamedia nc rdacarrier Another motherless daughter -- Great at a shiva -- Can we skip to the good parts? -- Days of onions -- Outsmarting my genetic destiny -- All the single ladies -- Meeting my destiny on the road I took to avoid it -- Cranial prosthesis -- A little death --Getting all chemotional -- Technically a woman -- The mom who knew too much. "By the time she was thirty, Gila Pfeffer was the oldest living member of her family, having lost her mother to breast cancer and her father to colon cancer. A simple blood test confirmed she carried the BRCA1 gene―which put her at high risk of developing cancer herself. Determined to break the cycle of early death in her family, Gila decides to undergo an elective double mastectomy. This memoir follows her journey as she becomes a reluctant expert on how to sit shiva, grows up, falls in love, and enters motherhood, before her life is derailed yet again. Her double mastectomy reveals cancer already growing in one breast. After enduring eight rounds of chemo and the removal of her ovaries, she takes her last-ever dip in the mikvah waters as a bald, menopausal, thirty-five-year-old mother of four. With chutzpah honed over years of repeatedly surviving the worst, she manages to save her own life.". 20240731. Pfeffer, Gila. Cancer Patients United States Biography. Cancer Genetic aspects. Children of cancer patients United States Biography. Jewish women United States Biography. Autobiographies.