Twenty-five years ago, Kathryn Giusti was diagnosed with multiple myeloma and given three years to live. An “impatient patient,” she overcame her fear and got to work, learning to advocate for her own care. This book is the result of all she’s learned about how to get the best result from America’s opaque and sometimes impossible-to-navigate health care system. This book tells the story of how Giusti took on the system and turned it to her advantage not once but twice when she was diagnosed with breast cancer a few years ago. It is a crash course in surviving a grim diagnosis, organized around twelve simple steps, with practical tips for everything from how to build your healthcare team and learning which online sources to trust, to understanding the science and identifying which tests to ask for in the new genomic era and how to access the treatments and studies that could save your life.