All These Fish

The price of curing childhood cancer — and one psychologist’s long way back to whole.

Lisa Riggs was diagnosed with alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma in 1978, at age seven. The treatment that cured her was, by today’s standards, staggering — and no one studied what it left behind, because almost no one had survived long enough to ask.

Thirty years later she was a clinical psychologist with a full practice when a survivorship clinic finally read her body’s history back to her. The chronic pain, the fatigue, the symptoms dismissed for decades as anxiety — all of it real, all of it the late effects of childhood cancer treatment. Being believed was the beginning.

All These Fish is a memoir of what healing actually asks: trauma therapy and EMDR, a theology remade, a body slowly re-inhabited — four selves, the psychologist, the adult patient, the child on the ward, and the woman she wanted to be, learning to live as one.

Written from both sides of the couch, it is a book for adult survivors of childhood cancer; for those living with chronic pain who have spent years being told it is something else; for trauma therapists and clinicians who want to know what healing feels like from the inside; for readers whose lives have carried them outside the theology they were raised with; and for anyone who has been told their pain is in their head.

It is, in the end, a book about coming home.

Lisa Riggs, Psy.D., is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Newport Beach, California, and a survivor of childhood alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma. For decades she ran a group psychotherapy practice specializing in trauma, treating children and adults with EMDR. All These Fish is her first book.