Illness Fiction

Kiss Tomorrow Hello brings together the experiences and reflections of women as they embark on a new stage of life. The 25 stellar writers gathered here explore a wide range of concerns, including keeping love and sex alive, discovering family secrets, negotiating the demands of illness and infertility, letting children go, making peace with parents, and contemplating plastic surgery. The tales are true, the confessions candid, and the humor infectious.

Gracie Hollaman finally decides to follow the voices in her head. She leaves behind her family for the small African-American town of Rockrun to join Mama Toot and Mattie. Together, the three will learn to shed their pasts to begin life anew.

Sixteen-year-old Saira has always juggled family, friendships, and her Girl Genius celebrity. Now, as the youngest med school graduate ever, she can finally achieve her mission to treat young people dealing with cancer. But proving herself in life-or-death situations is tough when everyone from her boss to her patients can't see past her age to trust her skills. And working in the same hospital as her mom isn't making things any easier!

As if her parents' divorce and sister's departure for college weren't bad enough, 14-year-old Ricky Bloom has just been diagnosed with a life-changing chronic illness. Her days consist of cursing everyone out, skipping school - which has become a nightmare - daydreaming about her crush, Julio, and trying to keep her parents from realizing just how bad things are. But she can't keep her ruse up forever.

Cancer stole everything from Ceelie - her peace of mind, her self-image, perhaps even her 23-year marriage to her college sweetheart, Nate. Without the support of Darlene, her quirky elderly friend, she may not have been able to endure so much loss. So when Darlene’s own prognosis turns dire, Ceelie can’t refuse her seemingly impossible request - to find a WWII paratrooper named Cal, the father who disappeared when Darlene was an infant, leaving a lifetime of desolation in his wake.

In jedem von uns steckt die Fähigkeit zur Selbstheilung, aber vielen Menschen ist sie abhandengekommen. Der Arzt, Neurowissenschaftler und Gesundheitsforscher Tobias Esch möchte das ändern und erklärt, wie Selbstheilung funktioniert und wie Sie Ihre Selbstheilungskompetenz stärken können. Seit vielen Jahren untersucht er unter anderem in Harvard und an der Berliner Charité, wie selbst chronische Krankheiten - zum Beispiel Diabetes, Asthma oder Rückenschmerzen - durch einen ganzheitlichen Ansatz, der auf den vier Säulen positive Emotionen, Entspannung, Ernährung und Bewegung beruht, gelindert werden.

Althea Carter and Oliver McKinley have been best friends since they were six; she's the fist-fighting instigator to his peacemaker, the artist whose vision balances his scientific bent. Now, as their junior year of high school comes to a close, Althea has begun to want something more than just best-friendship. Oliver, for his part, simply wants life to go back to normal, but when he wakes up one morning with no memory of the past three weeks, he can't deny any longer that something is seriously wrong with him. And then Althea makes the worst bad decision ever, and her relationship with Oliver is shattered.

Ash boards a Greyhound bus heading to the place where Bly was last seen: Snowflake, Arizona. Six thousand feet up in the wide red desert, Ash meets Mona, her dog, her goat, and her neighbors, and finds stepbrother Bly, too. In their ramshackle homes, the walls lined with tinfoil, almost all the residents of Snowflake are sick. But this isn’t any ordinary sickness: the chemicals and technologies of modern life are poisoning them.

Mental illness though can still carry a stigma. A case of ‘you’re not trying hard enough’, ‘or knuckling down and getting on with it’. But in more recent decades mental issues have come to be recognised as an illness, a disease rather than an affliction. We all remember horror stories of lobotomy’s and electric shock being used to ‘cure’ what society viewed as anti-social behaviour but illness, mental or physical is very real. Depression, schizophrenia, breakdown, psychosis are alarming events to have or to witness.

When she meets Connor, their attraction is magnetic and their steamy role-plays sizzle. She’s certain he feels their undeniable chemistry. They share a passion for movies, but he never takes her to see one. She can't figure out why he doesn’t message for days or why he won’t commit. Behind her party-girl persona, she can’t stop overanalyzing what must be wrong with her-or stop picking her skin. Her reckless lifestyle and an unexpected friendship with a drug dealer quickly transform her life from upbeat rom-com to twisted docudrama.

Eighteen-year-old Devon longs for two things: The stars, and the boy she fell in love with last summer. When Ashton breaks Devon's heart at the end of the most romantic summer ever, she thinks her heart will never heal again. But over the course of the following year, Devon finds herself slowly putting the broken pieces back together. Now it's senior year and she's determined to enjoy every moment of it, as she prepares for a future studying galaxies. That is, until Ashton shows up on the first day of school. Can she forgive and open her heart to him again?

A young woman puts on a white coat for her first day as a student doctor. So begins this powerful debut, which follows our unnamed narrator through cadaver dissection, surgical rotation, difficult births, sudden deaths, and a budding relationship with a seminarian. In the troubled world of the hospital, where the language of blood tests and organ systems so often hides the heart of the matter, she works her way from one bed to another, from a man dying of substance use and tuberculosis, to a child in pain crisis, to a young woman, fading from confusion to aphasia to death.

Seventeen year-old Jonas Norton is trying to come to terms with what his blood disorder has robbed from him, including his two most favorite things: basketball, and competing in Hatchet Racket, Wanless' annual hatchet-throwing contest. The facts that his father works constantly to pay for his blood tests and Jonas can actually see the disappointment in his eyes for being such a failure only make matters worse.

It’s morning at Meadow Brook Nursing Home. During the last 10 months, this has been my mother’s abode. Most days, I feel it is mine, too. Life, as I have known it, is a blur. Alzheimer’s has taken mother from herself, her family, and her friends. It has demanded a grit and grace in our everyday lives beyond human comprehension. I know that I must tell her story - which ultimately is my story, too - with hope that it may bring a degree of peace to the hearts of those who have walked, or will walk, the same road.

Hazel ha sedici anni, ma ha già alle spalle un vero miracolo: grazie a un farmaco sperimentale, la malattia che anni prima le hanno diagnosticato è ora in regressione. Ha però anche imparato che i miracoli si pagano: mentre lei rimbalzava tra corse in ospedale e lunghe degenze, il mondo correva veloce, lasciandola indietro, sola e fuori sincrono rispetto alle sue coetanee, con una vita in frantumi in cui i pezzi non si incastrano più.

La vida de Matthew Corbin, un chico de doce años con trastorno obsesivo-compulsivo, transcurre en la más absoluta pulcritud e intimidad: su pánico a los gérmenes le obliga a vivir encerrado en su habitación. Convencido de que el mínimo trato con otras personas puede contagiarle alguna enfermedad, Matthew pasa los días mirando el mundo a través de la ventana.

Lenny (short for Eleanor) feels like the world is about to end. Her best friend is moving to San Francisco and her dad is dying. To cope with her stress, Lenny is making a list of all the ways the world can end - designer pathogens, blood moon prophecies, alien invasion - and stockpiling supplies in a bunker in the backyard. Then she starts to develop feelings for her dad's very nice young doctor - and she thinks he may have feelings for her, too. Spoiler alert: he doesn't.

The story of a family's dramatic clinical and emotional journey as they try to understand why their third-grader is failing school. They assume that his problems stem from anxiety and stress because Dad is serving in the US military in Iraq. The child's blackouts are finally identified by a neurologist's evaluation, and the cause is epilepsy! The parents are devastated. Will Conner ever be able to live a normal life?

Two sisters, both beautiful in different ways: Fifteen-year-old Ted has got "The Look". That's what the scout for the modeling agency tells her, and she can't believe her luck. But just as Ted's jet-setting off on her new career, Ava is diagnosed with cancer. Can Ted be a supermodel and a super-sister? Or will she have to choose between family and fame? With their worlds turned upside down, the girls have to look past appearances, look deep inside, to figure out what really matters.

All She wants is a normal life. Diagnosed with a rare and untreatable heart condition, Scarlet has come to terms with the fact that she's going to die. Literally of a broken heart. It could be tomorrow, or it could be next year. But the clock is ticking…All Scarlet asks is for a chance to attend high school - even if just for a week - a chance to be just like everyone else. But Scarlet can feel her heart beating out of control with each slammed locker and vicious taunt. Is this normal? Really? Yet there's more going on than she knows.