"Poems Along the Path" is a story of a war that was waged and won. The author returned from a business trip in New Orleans to find her 3 year-old daughter extremely sick after many visits to her pediatrician who repeatedly told her there "was just something going around." Her child, in fact, had Stage 4 Neuroblastoma, a deadly and virtually incurable childhood cancer. "These poems speak for themselves. I think of them as poems along the path to recovery. I wrote them as part of a journal I kept during the year my three-year-old daughter was diagnosed with Neuroblastoma, a very formidable childhood cancer. They are expressions of the situations encountered by child and parents during the course of treatment as we moved through an odyssey of shock, anger, fear, pain, relief, and joy, as most cancer parents will, relative to their child's story." The poems trace the long journey from diagnosis to victory, chronicling the patient's and her family's struggle, the warrior doctor at Denver Children's Hospital, the brilliant scientists at UCLA Medical Center and the spirit and determination of young cancer patients awaiting bone marrow transplants. "My daughter, Kimberly Beesley, was one of the first children in the nation to survive a bone marrow transplant for the notorious cancer Neuroblastoma, due to the experimental protocol and extreme harshness of the chemotherapy and "total body radiation." I stayed with Kim in her room on the isolation wing at UCLA for 7 weeks during which I kept a journal, writing the poems included in this book, a tremendous outlet for the extreme emotional trauma I endured assisting the medical team wherever I could, in the battle for Kimberly's life. The poems contain valuable and difficult learnings that may be of use and comfort to other families in treatment. They detail the often inexplicable, but encouraging signposts along the way." Joan was especially honored to be a Key Speaker at The National Patient Advocate Foundation's Patient Congress IV in Washington D.C. to share the events of Poems Along the Path with participants, including cancer scientists, senators, legislators and insurance company CEO's.
