I am coming up on my 4 year anniversary of the end of my breast cancer treatment and while my body is not the same as it was prior to treatment, I am not devastatingly deformed and disabled.

I do suffer from fatigue, night sweats and insomnia which can truly be annoying. My hair is back but not at the level of thickness it once was. My eyelashes and brows have not come back well, and I keep gaining weight.

I am sure the weight us complicated by my medications all which state they cause weight gain. So I’ve decided to change my diet to help naturally ease the hot flashes and improve my energy.

Where to start? A cookbook for post breast cancer, right? With over 30 years under their belts, they are bound to have one!

So I head to my iTunes (what good is a cookbook if it’s not accessible) and I pull up a selection. A pick some samples to review and immediately get disappointed. None of these so called cookbooks give recipes in their samples.

Now I don’t know about you but I select cookbook for the number of recipes I would actually eat and enjoy making. So, when I get to my third sample with no table of contents and no recipes, I’m annoyed. It seems that these books are set up with a lecture about breast cancer, your risks of getting it and how it’s diagnosed and treated as their very long intro. Ah excuse me, I’ve been there, done that and bought the t-shirt. So how about a freakin recipe in your supposed “post treatment cookbooks”.

Finally I get to the last selection and it is by far the worst. If there is a recipe at all it’s buried somewhere within the hidden pages. But, what makes this the worst is that it’s sample is nothing more than a condemnation of the current medical treatment for breast cancer. If I were just starting this journey it would scare the shit out of me and I would wonder why live at all. I’m just going to die from a horrible complication from treatment!

None of these samples led me to purchase a book. In fact just the opposite. I decided that it is more advantageous for me to go to an actual bookstore with real books that I can look at.

Folks keep telling me print books are dead, well in the case of recipes…the hard copy cookbook is alive and well for me!