"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.
About the Author: Joan Beesley was born in 1946 in Brooklyn, New York. A former English teacher and telecommunications manager, Joan worked on her Ph.D, in English at the University of Denver after a stint with Time-Life Books in New York. Joan was especially honored to be Closing 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. "Poems Along the Path" is a compilation of poems Joan wrote in a journal she kept during her daughter's bone marrow transplant at UCLA in 1988. The journal resulted in her book Hothouse Flowers: "I Just Wanted to be Here When you Called My Name," a novel about pediatric cancer survival. Besides "Hot House Flowers" and "Poems Along the Path", Joan has published a second poetry collection, "Lot's Wife" and "Witchbox, A Collection of Short Stories". Her most recent work is an autobiography/biographical historic novel called "Forty Shades of Green: The Junkman of Brooklyn". This is the compelling story of an immigrant who arrived from Ireland in 1854 at age 3 with nothing, rising from "Junkman" to industrial millionaire. Joan currently lives in Denver, Colorado with her husband of 45 years, Ed Beesley, children Robert, Rosemary and Kimberly and grandchildren Tyler, Dillon, Ellen and Ashleigh. All of Joan's works are available as ebooks on Kindle and Amazon.com.