For World CML Day: a book of patient experiences

I’m delighted to announce that the book I’ve been working on all summer has now been published! It’s a book of interviews with people who have chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML) and the idea behind the book is to convey the real-life experiences of people with this chronic illness. I hope that it shows the diversity of possible responses and also the positive side of life with this condition.

The idea behind the book came from patient advocate Jan Geissler and photographer Bert Spangemacher. They both have CML and came up with the idea of sharing other patients’ experiences in book form a couple of years ago. They collaborated on a German-language book, which came out in time for World CML Day 2013.

The logical next step was to bring out a Europe-wide, English-language book telling the stories of people in various different countries. I’m very pleased that Jan's patient advocacy organisation hired me to carry out the interviews for this book. Listening to so many people’s stories has been a great experience; the toughest part was cutting all that interesting material down to the specified wordcount.

Today is World CML Day 2014 and I’m happy to introduce Faces of Courage and Hope: 16 Inspiring Stories of People Living with Chronic Myeloid Leukaemia. So far there have been 1300 pre-orders of the book from over 40 different countries.

I would like to thank all the people who agreed to talk to me for this book and shared their experiences with such candour and insight. I would also like to thank my family for their help and support during what’s been a very steep learning curve.