Battle for Grace

Battle for Grace is about a seven-year-old girl who sees Funny Girl and has a dream. To act, to dance and to sing. It's also about how she becomes a woman whose life is virtually destroyed by a crippling mystery illness and how she fights the institutions that failed her. A woman who has lived an almost impossible love story that began before her illness. Somehow she and the man who is her reason for living, her caregiver and her partner in life have managed to stick together for more than thirty difficult years. Battle for Grace tells how she reinvents herself and turns tragedy into triumph for millions of women worldwide. At the same time, she transforms her life into something more beautiful and meaningful than her original dreams of stardom. Ballerina Cynthia Toussaint's promising career ended abruptly when a rehearsal injury that caused excruciating pain remained undiagnosed for thirteen years. This left her bedridden for a decade, unable to speak for five of those years and often reduced to uncontrolled violence. Throughout all of this, Toussaint's claims of pain were discounted by her HMO as being all in her head-a frequent occurrence with women and their doctors. Many people with her illness-sometimes called the Suicide Disease-take their lives instead of contending with the pain. Toussaint's story is about her refusal to be a victim. She not only fought to survive, she has taken on the role of activist and aggressively challenges the HMOs and pharmaceutical companies that put profit ahead of patient care. Wheelchair bound, she founded a nonprofit and entered the political arena as an advocate for women in pain. Toussaint's memoir takes the reader on the roller coaster life of a woman who sees every no as a future yes. Despite pain, setbacks, abuse and betrayal, she holds her ground, finding in the process the spotlight she'd always coveted. And a deeper meaning in life than she ever expected.