Susan Abar's Against All Odds

Our life as mortals is but a breath in

length.  We are no different than the

flowers- beautiful and delicate, sturdy

and hearty- dropping petals one

by one, until the last breeze, the last

breath, takes away the last petal, and 

we return to dust.

-Susan Abar

April 23, 2007

Since we were iced in yesterday, I thought it would be the ideal time to read Susan Abar's Against All Odds:  Two Pennies, A Rainbow and A Woman Called Mercy, a gift from woman blessing Carol Cottingham.  Not knowing what the book was about, I was intrigued with not only the subtitle but the penny glued into place on the title page.
Reading further, I discovered the author has met more than her fair share of adversities in her adult life beginning with the loss of her job, which, in turn, was followed by a breast cancer diagnosis.  Written from the heart, the author accurately states what the loss of her breasts represented:
 
My eyes tracked the still-healing horizontal scars that crossed my chest like two six-inch dashes marking the place where my breasts had been . . . breasts that once nourished my babies . . . breasts that once defined me as a woman.  (19)

For me personally as a reader, I connected not only with her thoughts, but in the fact we had identical breast cancer diagnoses, estrogen positive inductile carcinoma, which had both been initially misdiagnosed as cysts.

The only problem I had were the wrong words used in the text such as, "As the months past"  (47) and "the write decision"  (29).
 
Without giving too much away, her cancer diagnosis did not end with her breasts.  So, Against All Odds is not only a telling of a miraculous medical journey, but, more importantly, a journey of Abar's faith resuscitated through the discovery of two pennies.