What Doesn’t Kill You:
The High, Lows and Unexpected Gifts of Cancer
Rachel Haynes
Being diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer while bringing up two growing children, holding down a full time job, going through a break-up and having three days to adjust to a life-changing operation is far from ideal. Add to this a short period of remission, a new relationship, followed by an unexpected relapse and the whole thing starting again, and you know you are going to be in for an interesting read.
Bowel cancer, despite being the UK’s second biggest cancer killer, still receives a shockingly low level of funding. This book aims in to help this, but to also tell Rachel’s unique story of survival. Her experience presents a wake-up call to what’s important in life and the truth about surviving against the odds.
This book is a funny and enlightening story about physical survival and then the messy psychological legacy of unexpected survival. Of wake-up calls that failed and an overwhelming urge to finally make sense of a life that Rachel was not expected to see.
What lies beneath survival is the realisation that the end of treatment is not the end of the story.
After all, what doesn’t kill you...
What Doesn't Kill You is available to order from your favourite independent bookseller, Waterstones and in both print and kindle versions from Amazon.
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About The Author
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Rachel Haynes met her husband 6 weeks before she relapsed with stage 4 bowel cancer again. Miraculously she survived and lives happily (spoiler alert) with her husband. She wrote 'What doesn't kill you...' to give hope to anyone wanting to find anyone alive and well 5 years on from an advanced cancer diagnosis and also to talk about what surviving a life sentence like this does to you, both the ups and the downs. After surviving cancer, she decided to leave her job as a Marketing Director for a software company and set up her own branding agency which she runs successfully with her brother. Rachel has also recently trained as a transformational coach to help cancer survivors find new purpose after the treatment has ended. She is also donating all profits from this book to the charity Bowel Cancer UK.
Her two children who were 11 and 13 when she was first diagnosed and lived their teenage years in the shadow of cancer have also gone on to train in both mental health nursing and as a medical student.
Her first book The C List was written in 2012 and just as the book was being published, she relapsed. Promising her friend, she would live to finish the story, this follow up includes for context an edited version of the story with part 1 - telling the story of physical survival and a new section part 2 - dealing with the aftermath, psychological survival.