Yours Truly (Part of Your World, #2)(112)

How did writing letters, instead of texting or emailing, influence Briana and Jacob’s relationship at the beginning? When was the last time you’ve written a letter and who did you send it to?

Jacob uses journaling and exercise as his forms of self-care when his anxiety flares. What kinds of self-care help relieve your stress?

At one point, Joy tells Jacob: If you’re with someone who doesn’t speak your language, you’ll spend a lifetime having to translate your soul. Do you think Amy was selfish for not understanding Jacob better, or were they just incompatible from the start? How much of a strong relationship comes down to innate compatibility and how much is empathy and understanding?

Briana destroyed Nick’s house after she caught him cheating and later felt embarrassed for being so petty. Have you ever done anything in the heat of the moment and regretted it after?

Jacob has such a colorful family full of distinctive personalities. Who was your favorite and why? Who did you relate to most? How are the Maddoxes similar or different from your family?

How has Briana’s view of men been shaped by her mother and her own life experiences? Could you understand why Briana was afraid to love Jacob?

Have you ever considered donating blood or an organ? Why or why not?





Author’s Note




When my editor asked me to write a little something about my reason for the themes in this book, at first I thought maybe I’d talk about my experience with anxiety, or my desire to write my first divorced heroine. But when I sat down to start, I realized that the story I wanted to tell was a lot more personal. So personal, in fact, that it’s only just now that I can even bring myself to talk about it.

Here’s me taking a big breath.

In 2020, in the midst of everything horrible that was going on in the world, I started to notice that I was losing my hair.

It wasn’t super obvious. It was so minor I thought maybe I was imagining it. It just seemed a tiny bit thinner than usual. Maybe it was the stress of the pandemic and the election year, or perhaps I was a little bit anemic. My periods were awful, so it could have been that. I felt totally fine. I started taking iron and told myself if it didn’t improve in a few months, I’d go see my doctor just in case.

When I finally did see my doctor, my entire world was turned upside down.

I had chronic kidney disease.

Within the span of one week, I was diagnosed with that and a lifelong, progressive autoimmune disease, the cause of my condition. And the prognosis wasn’t good. I was given a thirty-three percent chance of my kidney disease going into remission, a thirty-three percent chance of it staying the same, and a thirty-three percent chance of going into full renal failure within five years. I was forty years old.

I went from being a perfectly healthy woman who didn’t even take a multivitamin to someone who saw a different specialist every week. I slipped into a world of painful procedures and treatments. I had a kidney biopsy. I was placed on a slew of medications. I got a second opinion. Then a third. I absolutely hate needles and now I was getting blood drawn two, sometimes three times a month.

The doctors wanted to place me on chemo drugs to suppress my immune system to try to stop the onslaught, and I was terrified about what those would do to my body. I was terrified to have a depressed immune system during a pandemic before a vaccine was available. I Googled my autoimmune disease and tumbled down Facebook-group rabbit holes, where I read stories about people getting ulcers on their eyes and losing all their teeth. I sat in a Starbucks parking lot sobbing after realizing that my favorite drink didn’t taste the same because of what my autoimmune disease was doing to my salivary glands.

I slid into a depression. My best friend was so worried about me she slid into a depression too. I cried every single day. I was put on a restricted renal diet and couldn’t eat the foods I loved. I was no longer allowed to take NSAIDs, so my painful periods became excruciating and unbearable. The quality of my life plummeted.

This diagnosis broke me.

And the whole time nobody outside of my inner circle knew a thing. I was posting on social media, promoting my books, and acting outwardly normal. I wrote Part of Your World in the midst of all this, somehow managing to churn out my most successful book to date. Everything looked amazing from the outside, but really I was living the worst year of my life.

Your kidneys don’t like to tell you when they’re sick. In fact, most people don’t show any signs of sickness until they’re in stage-three kidney disease. I was extremely lucky that I noticed my hair thinning and I didn’t wait longer than I did to get checked out. There wasn’t scarring on my kidneys yet, so my doctors agreed to a wait-and-see approach to give the less-toxic medications a chance to start working before they put me on something harsher.

But every month for half a year the labs were the same. I wasn’t improving. I would get anxiety the days leading up to and after my bloodwork. The emails with my results would give me panic attacks when I’d get the notification, because it was never good news. My world revolved around my health issues. I was Benny. And then all of a sudden and out of nowhere, my labs came back a little better.

I tried not to get my hopes up, but the next month my numbers dropped even farther. Every time my bloodwork came in, it was an improvement on the month before. My hair started to grow back and my autoimmune disease got quiet and my coffee started to taste good again—and then POOF. A year after my diagnosis, I went into full remission. I got my life back. Just like that. I’ll be on medications for the rest of my life, I’ll always have my autoimmune disease, and it could always flare up again, but a full remission gives you a wonderful prognosis. I don’t think even my own doctor expected what happened. I was very, very lucky.