Photo: Erielle Bakkum Photography
About Megan
Megan Balderston is a writer, corporate executive, and singer, and the mother of a childhood cancer survivor. She studied voice and opera in college and has spent more than twenty years balancing a corporate career with a life in music, including years as managing director of Chicago Chorale, the choir she still sings with. She also sings as a church cantor and performs in a local community revue.
In 2015, when her sixteen-year-old daughter, Celia, was diagnosed with esthesioneuroblastoma, an extremely rare cancer, Megan began writing CaringBridge updates that eventually reached nearly 700 followers. She kept the account going through treatment and the long years of surveillance that followed, until 2021. Those posts, along with her journals and notes, became the foundation of Another Kind of Patient. The memoir grew out of a speech she delivered for That's What She Said, a storytelling organization celebrating women's voices. She wrote it to answer a question Celia asked near the end of treatment: "What happens when I'm not special anymore?"
Megan lives in the Chicago suburbs with her husband, Steve, a cellist, and occasionally their two adult children, Celia and James.
The Book
Another Kind of Patient
by Megan Balderston, with a foreword by Celia Balderston
Published by She Said Press
The teenager in the hospital bed is the patient everyone can see. On the vinyl pull-out couch beside her, laptop open in the dark, her mother is becoming another kind of patient.
In July 2015, sixteen-year-old Celia Balderston falls ill on a summer trip to Florida. Within weeks, her family is facing esthesioneuroblastoma, a cancer so rare that only about 200 cases had been diagnosed in the United States over the previous twenty years. Overnight, Megan Balderston trades sock-sorting and choir tours for scans and sodium levels, bargaining with residents, nights of broken sleep, and the long stretch of "hurry up and wait."
Drawn from the CaringBridge posts she wrote in real time for nearly 700 followers, Another Kind of Patient follows one family through chemotherapy, surgeries, radiation, and the uncertain years of surveillance that come after. It is a clear-eyed memoir of caregiving, marriage, and community: a husband and a younger son carrying the weight in their own ways, neighbors who organize meal trains and laundry runs, and a mother learning how to wait, how to stay, and how to let other people hold her up.
Honest, funny when it can be, and fiercely tender, the book also takes on the question Celia asks near the end of treatment: "What happens when I'm not special anymore?" Megan's answer reaches past the crisis into what comes next: returning to ordinary life, choosing the "get-tos" over the "have-tos," and discovering that sometimes strength simply means showing up, day after day.
With a foreword by Celia herself, Another Kind of Patient is for parents and caregivers keeping vigil beside someone they love, for anyone walking alongside a loved one through serious illness, and for the friends, neighbors, and care teams who show up for them. It is a reminder that no one has to face the hardest days alone.
Buy the Book
Get your copy at the Oct 16 launch. Online ordering coming soon.
Also available soon at Amazon and other retailers.
Upcoming Events
Book Launch
Friday, October 16, 2026
Power of Storytelling Women's Conference
Copper Creek Church, Champaign, IL
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Published by She Said Press
