Until I see a drop of water fall on the keyboard, I don’t even realize I am crying. I touch my face. it is soaked. As the printer churns out each page, each person who had stage IV liver cancer and survived, I weep. Hope floods back into my body, and I welcome it because I need it the way our mother needs her drugs, the way some people need a god. I feel reborn as the papers pile up in the printer feeder; my faith restored by UFT, a miracle drug doctors cannot yet explain.

Better Off Bald chronicles my sister Adrienne’s 147-day battle with liver cancer; the book also shows how I reared Adrienne from the time she was eight until she died at the age of fifteen. For more information about primary liver cancer, go to Blue Faery: The Adrienne Wilson Liver Cancer Association.