Wednesday 7 November 2012

Thank-you authors, your stories have such power

Dear Authors,
Thank-you so much for sharing your stories.  They have brought great comfort to me and my family, especially during the past few months.

Over the past year my father battled Multiple Myeloma.  It is a relatively rare cancer of the blood.  One side effect of the treatments was that he developed severe nerve pain in his legs.  Prescribed pain killers did nothing to lessen this pain.  There were only two things that helped: Tylenol Arthitis and reading.  In the final months of his life, he would often sit up all night in pain, a book for company.  Page after page, hour after hour, he would read.  He would get so caught up in your stories that he would be able to forget the pain for minutes at a time.  Before he knew it, it would be morning and another five or six hundred page book would be finished.  Yes, the pain would come back, but at least he had escaped it for a little while.

Once again, thank-you for sharing your stories and providing such comfort to my dad.

Sincerely
Heather

2 comments:

Nan said...

What a wonderful thing to write. It brings tears to my eyes.

Karen Greenberg said...

What a wonderful way to show how reading can affect our lives. I, too, have nerve pain that is not touched by pain killers. Often, finding distraction is the only thing that gets me through. I'm glad your dad had books to keep him company.