Beating the Blowfish

Price: £9.95

There seems to be an increasing number of  highly competent women racers around. Emma Pontin was working in the City, when, aged 32, she made a major career change to ocean racing, in which she was obviously doing well till, in November 2006, about to skipper a boat from Gibraltar to the Canaries, she received a phone call from her consultant surgeon. She had a malignant tumour in her left breast which had spread to her lymph glands. What follows is her diary through to January, 2009. In that time, she has a mastectomy, chemotherapy and radiotherapy and her life is on hold. The Blowfish is her visualisation of the cancer. She gets back on the water and starts racing again, gets  married to her partner, Rich, who proposed during the treatment. The racing parts lack the intensity of the treatment accounts, and   I would have liked more on the Sydney-Hobart in exchange for her second ARC race in an American yacht with plasma TV.  Presumably because she was very fit, she handles the treatments well but she has one more shock in store for the squeamish reader. She has elected for reconstructive surgery. She chooses to have her good breast removed as a preventive measure, and have two reconstructed breasts (with pictures of before and immediately after). Emma Pontin worked with BBC Radio Solent 100 Lives Project which allowed her to share her experience, and this book presumably ties in with that project.  While the diary form inevitably is a bit choppy, it has an immediacy that is hard to gainsay. Emma Pontin obviously wanted to tell of her journey back to health – long may it last, for all that the doctors will predict for a “cure is five years - as it happened, and that’s exactly what she’s done.

 Mike Bender