Disorders & Diseases

Elizabeth Glasson was living an ordinary life worrying about nothing more than getting home from work in time to pick up the kids and whether there would be another series of Desperate Housewives. All that changed one fateful summer when she discovered a lump in her left breast and things got a whole lot more complicated.

Five years on, she revisits the blog she wrote during treatment for an aggressive grade 3, stage 3 breast cancer and looks at the experience with the benefit of hindsight and a great pair of tinted specs.

A funny, poignant and ultimately hopeful story from a mother, wife, friend and colleague who (nearly) always saw the glass half full...

Rebecca has everything she ever prayed for and more, and is living like she doesn't care if she loses it all. Dani's business is thriving and her faith is strong. Her diagnosis will expose her own insecurities and life's truth. Jenessa epitomizes the definition of a strong woman. A routine doctor's visit forces her to confront the genetic cloud that has hovered over her since childhood.

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.

Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.

Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia—a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo—to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.

Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family—past and present—is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.

Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother’s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance? 
          
Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.

Are you ready to rethink and redefine your approach to aging? This powerhouse book tells you how to go from dreading it to making it the greatest passage of your life!

Dubbed a health pioneer by the Wall Street Journal and called “crazy smart” by Dr. Mehmet Oz, Suzanne Somers has repeatedly opened up new terrain to health seekers worldwide. And now, with Bombshell, she does it again. Acting like your personal medical detective, she has found the most advanced scientists, doctors, and health professionals and gotten them to share jaw-dropping advances that will stop deterioration and set you on the path to restoration and healthy longevity.

By taking advantage of these new bombshell advancements, you can live longer than ever with great quality of life, and experience a different way to age: with great health, strong bones, vitality, a working brain, and sizzling sexuality. All of it is yours for the taking if you are willing to make some simple, effective changes.

In Bombshell you will learn about explosive medical secrets utilizing the groundbreaking technologies of today, or the very near future, that will allow us all to truly maintain the fountain of youth, including: 

   • How nanobots, small “robots” the size of blood cells, will be injected into the human bloodstream to clean the blood supply and literally wipe out today’s most feared diseases
   • How stem cell procedures, using one’s own adult stem cells, can be used to prevent disease and even regrow body parts; including how Suzanne’s breast was reconstructed after cancer with no implant in the first clinical trial of its kind in the United States
   • How balancing hormones with bioidentical hormone replacement therapy can improve your internal health, well-being, vitality, looks, and sex drive
   • How the “cure” to cancer might be just around the corner by preventing it at the source with injections of human, cancer-resistant white blood cells
   • How a supplement to regrow telomeres at a cellular level will restore the human body to a younger internal age and reverse signs of aging such as disease, baldness, wrinkles, and loss of hearing and eyesight. And it’s available now!

One after another, she shares the breakthroughs that you can use today to keep you in top shape so you can embrace the near future and all it will have to offer.

In THE BLOOD SUGAR SOLUTION, Dr. Mark Hyman reveals that the secret solution to losing weight and preventing not just diabetes but also heart disease, stroke, dementia, and cancer is balanced insulin levels. Dr. Hyman describes the seven keys to achieving wellness-nutrition, hormones, inflammation, digestion, detoxification, energy metabolism, and a calm mind-and explains his revolutionary six-week healthy-living program. With advice on diet, green living, supplements and medication, exercise, and personalizing the plan for optimal results, the book also teaches readers how to maintain lifelong health. Groundbreaking and timely, THE BLOOD SUGAR SOLUTION is the fastest way to lose weight, prevent disease, and feel better than ever.

A lot of professors give talks titled "The Last Lecture." Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them. And while they speak, audiences can't help but mull the same question: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy?

When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave--"Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams"--wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because "time is all you have...and you may find one day that you have less than you think"). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living.

In this book, Randy Pausch has combined the humor, inspiration and intelligence that made his lecture such a phenomenon and given it an indelible form. It is a book that will be shared for generations to come.

"We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand." --Randy Pausch

A remarkably frank, deeply moving, and inspiring memoir by Jai Pausch, whose husband, Randy, wrote the bestseller The Last Lecture while battling pancreatic cancer.
 
"Jai is such a giver that she often forgets to take care of herself," Randy Pausch wrote about his wife. "Jai knows that she’ll have to give herself permission to make herself a priority."
     In Dream New Dreams, Jai Pausch shares her own story for the first time: her emotional journey from wife and mother to full-time caregiver, shuttling between her three young children and Randy’s bedside as he sought treatment far from home; and then to widow and single parent, fighting to preserve a sense of stability for her family, while coping with her own grief and the challenges of running a household without a partner.
 Jai paints a vivid, honest portrait of a vital, challenging relationship between two strong people who faced a grim prognosis and the self-sacrificing decisions it often required. As she faced life without the husband she called her “magic man,” Jai learned to make herself a priority to create a new life of hope and happiness—as she puts it, to “feel a spark of my own magic beginning to flicker.”
     Dream New Dreams is a powerful story of grief, healing, and newfound independence. With advice artfully woven into an intimate, beautifully written narrative, Jai’s story will inspire not only the legions of readers who made The Last Lecture a bestseller, but also those who are embarking on a journey of loss and renewal themselves.