Kudos to filmmaker/author Kris Carr for her indefatigable courage and yeehaw! humor as she shares her experience with cancer in both a documentary film (Crazy Sexy Cancer) and companion book, Crazy Sexy Cancer Tips. A spunky cancer survival manual, Crazy Sexy Cancer Tips is a practical, powerfully positive and in-your-face guide for younger women (from 20-somethings to women in their early 40s) who face a cancer diagnosis and are not about to let the C-word win.
In 2003, actress and party cowgirl Carr was feeling punk after a week of excess. She thought she’d sweat out her hangover in a yoga class; the next day she was breathless and in severe abdominal pain. A doctor’s visit revealed a rare, stage IV vascular cancer that had attacked her lungs and liver, making the latter look like Swiss cheese. Confronted with a slow-growing, apparently untreatable cancer, Carr heeded her doctor’s advice to strengthen her immune system through radical changes to diet and lifestyle. Says Carr, I quickly perked up. . . . Dr. Guru didn’t know it, but in that moment he planted the seeds for a personal revolution. Following a soulful foreword by cancer survivor/musician Sheryl Crow, eight relentlessly honest and cheerleading chapters (plus a comprehensive resource section) speak to women not as cancer victims, but as triumphant survivors. Covered are concerns from the emotional ( Holy shit! I have cancer, now what?), the nutritional and sexual ( Eat your veggies and Bandage or bondage ), to the practical ( Cancer college ). One dynamic thing that Carr did for her own healing was to form a posse, a group of women with cancer who made up her sassy support group/cancer stitch-and-bitch. Crazy Sexy Cancer Tips includes their profiles and stories and reveals the heroic and compassionate ways in which they responded to and dealt with cancer, thereby graduating from cancer babes to cancer cowgirls.
