TERRI SCHLICHENMEYER The Bookworm Sez Advertisement

Whining does no good.

You can rant and wail. You can scream to whatever God you believe in, pound a pillow, or glare at everyone around you. Tears are cathartic and fear is easy to understand, but none of these will change anything if your diagnosis is cancer.

That's one of the things you learn up-front in the new book "It's Not About the Hair" by Debra Jarvis.

As a chaplain in the cancer center at a Seattle hospital, Jarvis counsels patients who are new to chemotherapy and their disease.

She talks to family members about treatment and expectations.

She listens.

And she talks about dying to cancer patients who are terminal.

You would think, with a job like that, Jarvis would have seen it all.

And you might be right. She had, until she herself was diagnosed with stage I breast cancer.

Jarvis said she cried but wasn't as terrified as she thought she would be.

First of all, she had seen cancer: what it means, what it does, how people react to it, and that it can be survived. Secondly, she had faith in God and a sense of humor. Sometimes, those were one and the same.

Jarvis went through a mastectomy and reconstruction, but while her treatments were exhausting and her body felt as if it had run the kind of marathon that she was fond of tackling, Jarvis never stopped caring for the patients.

Woven through the narrative of her treatment, her work and her post-cancer life, Jarvis remembers people like Addie, who died with her three rambunctious grandchildren attending, and whose 5-year-old grandson put the adults at ease.

She writes about Jenny, who received a "rock ritual" after her last treatment.

She writes of Cindy, who planned her own death.

She writes of the faith she shared with them and all her patients as they went through treatment together.

As an almost 17-year survivor of cancer, I've read a lot of books about cancer by former patients and by the doctors who treat the disease. Among those books, "It's Not About the Hair" is refreshingly different.

Gone are the doomsday suggestions for sores and stents and sutures. There are no maudlin bedside scenes where people carry on and relatives wail, and while you'll find anger in this book, you'll find more of an abundance of joy.

Yes -- joy.

"It's Not About the Hair" is all about finding peace and faith, no matter where your cancer takes you. It's about the silliness (and needfulness) of buying mastectomy lingerie. And it's about surviving the days you have left, whether it's two, 22, or 22,000.

Whether you've just been diagnosed with any kind of cancer, are many years past treatment, or if you've been on the support side of surviving, "It's Not About the Hair" is an excellent book about living and dying and the faith to do both.

If you fall into one of the above categories (and who doesn't?), isn't it about time you read it?

"It's Not About the Hair" by Debra Jarvis, Sasquatch Books, $23.95, 245 pages.