Ruth Marshall is an actor perhaps best known for playing Helen Martin, mother to one of the teen characters on the long-running TV show Degrassi. In 2012, her life was upended when she was diagnosed with a spinal meningioma, a non-cancerous tumour on her spine that had been growing for almost a decade.

Although the tumour was successfully removed (during an eight-hour surgery), it was located on the proprioceptive nerve, which gives the human body its spatial sense of position and movement. As a result, Marshall endured months of rehabilitation to relearn rudimentary tasks such as standing, walking unassisted, using the bathroom and having sex. Marshall found that humour helped her cope during her long rehabilitation.

She details this ordeal in her memoir Walk It Off. She spoke with CBC Books about how she wrote about such a personal experience.

"The writing process began while I was in the hospital. I'm a big reader of books but with my condition, I was finding it hard to concentrate on anything. It was really frustrating. I couldn't read. I had a terrible attention span and I had a very difficult time focusing on things, including the doctors and nurses. So I would find time every day to write longhand as a way of processing information. This became a habit. By the time I was in rehab for two months, it was something that I looked forward to doing every single day."

"I wanted to entertain myself. I'm not a very glum writer nor a very glum person. I started with an audience of one. I wrote as if my husband was looking over my shoulder because I like to make him laugh, and he likes to read what I write. As I kept writing, I had the very strong sense that more than just one person might get something out of it."

"It was never exhausting to get the words out. It was a joy. A lot of gross things were happening to me, things that nobody should really have to go through. But, sometimes, if what you write is gross or frustrating, you learn what your writing style is, and mine is to naturally find the humour in things. I was never searching for the funny. I was always shocked when I read over my writing and thought, 'There was nothing funny about what I experienced day-to-day and hour-by-hour, but it looks so funny on the page.' Even when I had moments that caused me to cry, I'd write about it and it helped me realize that, while these are (crappy) moments, let's just move on."