When I was twenty-seven—a skinny, gray-faced scrap, bleeding continuously and hardly able to stand upright—my disease was named. But it was named on the operating table, and to make me viable I had to lose part of my bladder and my bowel, my womb and my ovaries. I woke up to a strange future—childlessness, a premature menopause, and a marriage, already tottering, that would soon fall apart.

Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self-…, loc. 234