By Shelby Stewart-Soldan
Staff Writer
Brandon Twp. — When Amy Boyer was diagnosed with breast cancer, she got a lot of different books on the topic.
“They were all really sad and I didn’t want to read them, so I wanted to write something positive for someone else,” said Boyer. “What do you do when you’re walking through a fire. It’s got sad parts of course, but it’s about how to get through it.”
Boyer, a Brandon Township resident, was diagnosed with breast cancer three years ago, and this year she published her debut novel “In the Fire: Navigating the Chaos of Cancer.”
“Before this, we had 15 years of infertility, and I started writing that book first,” she said. “And because I was bedridden with cancer, I had nothing else to do. So I put the infertility book aside and wrote this one first.”
The book highlights her experience with breast cancer, as well as the experience of others in the community.
“I didn’t want it to be just my perspective, so every chapter starts with someone else’s story and the lessons they learned,” she said. “I constantly have people who want me to talk to them or talk to their friend about cancer, so I wanted to be able to hand them a book instead.”
Boyer was diagnosed with stage 3C breast cancer after a fall in her home, which resulted in a lump that wouldn’t go away.
“It’s not hereditary for me,” she said. “It’s kind of funny, not funny. I fell because my husband put a bag of trash in the wrong spot and I tripped with my four-year-old. His elbow went into my side, and I got a bump that never went away. I thought I would just get a lumpectomy and be fine, but no. I had a double mastectomy, chemo, the whole nine-yards.”
Following the diagnosis, Boyer says the community rallied around her, despite not knowing many people in town at the time.
“They just took care of me,” she said. “Strangers dropped off food, people took my kids to things. I call them my tribe.”
Boyer had finished her book this year and was about to send it to the printer when she fell again this October, and put her book on a slight pause.
“This time it erupted a staff infection in one of my implants,” she said. “I almost died, it was sepsis. I thought I was going to die. I had literally announced the book four days prior, but the way that my tribe just totally kicked back into gear, I knew I wanted that to be the last chapter of the book. Within 24 hours, my kids, my dogs, my groceries were all taken care of.”
Boyer describes her book as an uplifting guidebook for someone going through any of life’s difficulties and for the people that love them.
“It’s for anybody going through anything, but it’s also about how we love people well when they’re going through something,” she said. “It’s very specific, because people just don’t know how to do it.”
The book is available at the Brandon Township Public Library, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, It’s the Little Things and Willow Pointe of Ortonville. She is also planning two more books in the future, “In the Waiting” about dealing with infertility, and “In the Dark” about suicide and mental health, as she said her father committed suicide when she was a teenager.
“If someone was going through it, I’d say attitude is 50% of how well you walk it out,” she said. “Guarding your mind and your attitude is huge. Just learning to live above the chaos.”