In-Between Days: A Memoir About Living with Cancer

By Teva Harrison

2016 Governor General's Literary Award Finalist

2017 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize Winner

2017 Joe Shuster Award Nominee

Teva Harrison was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer at the age of 37. In this brilliant and inspiring graphic memoir, she documents through comic illustration and short personal essays what it means to live with the disease. She confronts with heartbreaking honesty the crises of identity that cancer brings: a lifelong vegetarian, Teva agrees to use experimental drugs that have been tested on animals. She struggles to reconcile her long-term goals with an uncertain future, balancing the innate sadness of cancer with everyday acts of hope and wonder. She also examines those quiet moments of helplessness and loving with her husband, her family, and her friends, while they all adjust to the new normal.

Ultimately, In-Between Days is redemptive and uplifting, reminding each one of us of how beautiful life is, and what a gift.

• Language: English
• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Release date: Apr 23, 2016
• ISBN: 9781487001100

Teva Harrison

TEVA HARRISON (1976–2019) was an author and visual artist. She wrote and illustrated the critically acclaimed graphic memoir In-Between Days, which was the winner of the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Nonfiction, a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction and the Joe Shuster Award for Cartoonist or Auteur, and was a Globe and Mail, National Post, Kobo, and Quill & Quire Book of the Year. Forty-five works from In-Between Days have been exhibited in a solo show at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Teva was Principal Illustrator for the National Film Board/National Theatre production of playwright Jordan Tannahill’s Draw Me Close: A Memoir, a virtual reality theatrical experience blending live theatre and virtual reality technology. She was a finalist for the Canadian Magazine Award and the National Magazine Award, and her writing appeared in the Walrus, Granta, Quill & Quire, the Huffington Post, Carte Blanche, Reader’s Digest (Canada, U.S., and International editions), the Globe and Mail, and more. She was a regular commentator on CBC Radio, in the Toronto Star, and in the Globe and Mail, and she appeared on programs including Canada AM, The Agenda with Steve Paikin, Space TV’s InnerSpace, The Morning Show, and in Maclean’s, Chatelaine, and Rabble.ca. She was also the illustrator of The Joyful Living Colouring Book.

Book preview

For David, who lifts me up

For my family and my ancestors

For the friends who step in

and make my life possible

For all people living with metastatic cancer,

as well as we can

CONTENTS

Preface: Drawing Forward

Prologue: In-Between Days

PART ONE

Diagnosis

learning that i am going to die

Treatment

by the skin of my teeth

Side Effects

what can be withstood

PART TWO

Marriage

love changes everything

Family

a mixed-bag inheritance

Society

finding my way

PART THREE

Hopes

if wishes were horses

Fears

they don’t just go bump in the night

Dreams

all tangled up in you

Resources

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Preface

Drawing Forward

At the age of thirty-seven, I was diagnosed with advanced metastatic breast cancer. My disease is currently incurable, but the wonderful people in my medical team are doing everything they can to turn it into a chronic illness. 

In order to make sense of what is happening to my body, I started seeing a psychiatrist within the psychosocial oncology team at my hospital. Talking about cancer turned into talking about my past, about my childhood and the coping mechanisms I’d developed, not all of which I’d call healthy. I’d leave his office churning with complicated emotions.

Back home, all worked up and raw, I started to draw my worst memories, my lived nightmares. An exorcism of sorts. I found myself drawing dark, primitive comics, and then I’d feel a bit of peace. Once the story was outside of my head, I could let go a little.

When I showed these illustrations to my doctor, he was so pleased. He encouraged me to keep drawing and see where it took me.

The brain is a tangle of memory, feeling, hope, and dream. Pull on a thread and it all unravels. In order to make sense of my cancer, I found myself working through all the buried, unresolved hurt and memory from my life before cancer.

It took months of drawing about my childhood before I even started to draw about my experience living with the disease. 

I’ve been an artist my whole life, but this is the first time I have felt the need for narrative. Figuring out how to tell my story with comic strips has been interesting and empowering. When I was first diagnosed, I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I’ve since learned that it’s the unspoken that is most frightening. Shining a light on my experiences takes some of the power away from the bogeyman that is my cancer. I’m taking my power back.

I hope that by talking about some of the hard stuff, I am helping other people who are living with cancer or other serious illnesses (and their caregivers and supporters) to start conversations with peers and professionals, with their friends and family, and with their doctors. 

Teva Harrison

Toronto, Ontario

December 2015

Prologue

In-Between Days

I occupy the liminal spaces, slipping between unnoticed.

The hours of cancer are strange. MRIs at 3:00 a.m., pain at 2:00 a.m., capable one day, incapable the next.

It’s like living in the shadows.

And so I take the spaces nobody claims and I occupy them in the best way I know how: living life with a sense of wonder and delight.

Because I don’t know how long I get to bask in the glory of this world and the people I love.

Part OneDiagnosis: Learning that I am going to die

What’s Wrong with Me?

I was in so much pain. All the time. Its onset was gradual, slippery. I’d wake up with hip pain. Carrying groceries was getting harder. I was training for my second half-marathon, and it was much harder than the first. I found that after a run, my back and hip ached. I thought this must be what aging felt like.

I asked my husband, Is this normal? but after a lifetime of soccer injuries, David’s barometer wasn’t calibrated normally.

So I tried to be stoic. I tried not to complain. I popped Advil and Tylenol, but they barely made a difference.

I had to speak at a conference. The drive was gruelling, stop-and-go traffic for hours. I grabbed my bag out of the back seat of the car, and with a casual twist of the back I was doubled over in pain. Confused and tired, I checked into my hotel room and lowered myself onto the bed. I popped some more painkillers and went to sleep. I had to speak at eight the next morning.

When I woke up, the pain was manageable again, so I spoke and drove home.

The next night, I was cooking dinner for friends. I reached for a hanging cast-iron pan, twisting again to set it on the burner. Pain shot through my back and I fell to the floor. I couldn’t stand, so my husband cooked while I gave him directions. I took painkillers and a muscle relaxant with a glass of wine. By the time our guests arrived, I could stand but I couldn’t sit, so we had dinner at the breakfast bar, with me forgoing the high stool.

I joked about injuries of age, how lifting and twisting was now a hazard for me.

After a fitful attempt at sleep, I woke my husband up to take me to emergency. The pain was excruciating.

When a doctor finally saw me, she

Reviews for In-Between Days

[villemezbrown · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Engrossing and moving autobiographical cartoons, vignettes and short essays about living with a terminal illness.With such short snippets, the book does get a little too random at times, and in general I'm not a fan of hybrid graphic novels. Here, every one-page cartoon is followed by one to two pages of text that comments on the cartoon or reiterates and expands upon the theme of the cartoon. The repetition detracts and makes me wish the cartoons were allowed to stand on their own, but its understandable that Harrison wanted to get as much in as quickly as possible. And what she does capture is very valuable.

[emeraldreverie · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A hard, real read. Half short form comics, half essay, a very open and honest struggle with cancer. Sometimes hard to read.

[lissabeth21 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was an amazing, first person description of living life with genetic metastatic cancer. It's a revelation to see someone be so open and raw with their emotions and experiences.

[tomdonaghey · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

THE PRINCELING OF NANJING by Ian Hamilton is a book that left me scratching my head. How, I wondered, could a book about forensic accounting ever be interesting? But here is the answer. When her friend, Xu, head of one of the Shanghai Tongs, is being pushed into a terrible alliance with the most powerful family in Nanjing, he turns to Ava Lee. Ava is in her second book of this series. In the first we get a great feel for her background and her abilities in using accounting to destroy enemies. Reading what I just wrote makes this book seem extremely lame, but it is anything but that. Shanghai, the people, the city, the lights and smells and insanity under control are all brought to vivid life. Ava's day job of investing in and helping to get the foundling PO clothing line into a solid stance in the Asian market is the cause for her to be in Asia to begin with. Fortunately that is only about a quarter of the story. The heart of the book is how she tries to get this powerful family, one of China's fabled families from the heroes of "The Long March", to back away from XU without destroying Xu in the process. The story line is compelling, the characters three dimensional, and there is the plus in that you do not need to have read the initial book to understand the history of these people. I didn't read it and I followed along just fine. Only now I have to find a copy of THE KING OF SHANGHAI so as to get all the fascinating back story.

[alanteder · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ava Lee settles in as 小老闆 (Xiao Lao Ban or Little Boss)This is the 2nd novel of the Ava Lee sub-series called the Triad Years, where the formidable forensic accountant has moved on from her debt collection years with Uncle and is instead running the Three Sisters investment firm with her friend May Ling Wong and her sister-in-law Amanda Yee while also lending support to her new ally/silent partner, the Triad chairman Xu.The plot here follows closely upon the end of the previous book "The King of Shanghai", with Three Sisters continuing their plans for the launch of Clark Po’s PÖ clothing line. Ava Lee has to juggle that with a project of assisting Xu in a behind-the-scenes business struggle with a corrupt Chinese political and business dynasty.Ian Hamilton has not lost his touch with the new challenges of making fashion clothing line launches and international forensic accounting investigations suspenseful. The plot zips along and before you can say “bak mei”, Ava is back in the groove, even when facing what initially seems like the insurmountable odds of an entire 3-generation family dynasty. She is indeed the "Little Boss".I am already looking forward to The Couturier of Milan, the expected next book in the series.p.s. minor quibble, there were a few instances of typos between the words “one” and “once”, which obviously could not be caught by spellcheck. e.g. pg. 309 “get out of here in once piece."