"The Cost of Hope," by Amanda Bennett Thirteen years into her marriage, during her son's 12th-birthday party, Amanda Bennett found her husband, Terence Foley, doubled over in pain on their bed. Alarmed, she rushed him to the hospital, where he was found to have a severe bowel disease. A doctor casually mentioned that a scan also showed a "shadow" on his kidney. "You are going to want to get that looked at," he said. As Bennett writes in her memoir, "The Cost of Hope," the shadow was looked at. It was rescanned, removed and sent to a lab. It was diagnosed twice - first as "collecting duct" cancer, then as "papillary" cancer (doctors still disagree over what it was) - and treated with drugs bearing price tags of $200 per daily pill and $109,440 for four one-hour intravenous drips. It also spread to Foley's lungs, and in December 2007, it took his life. He was 67. The bill for his seven years of treatment totaled $618,616. Bennett is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and an executive editor at Bloomberg News (this book grew out of an article she wrote for Bloomberg). Her memoir is equal parts marriage confessional and skilled investigative report. It's a story of the sometimes amusing, sometimes baffling relationship and hectic but rewarding life she shared with Foley for over two decades. It's also the fascinating account of an illness - its origins, composition and progression - and of the cost (mental, physical and financial) of trying to treat it via the complicated, frustrating, outrageously expensive American health care system. Bennett recounts how she met Foley at a party in Beijing in 1983, while working as a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. She was 32; he was 44. A stout man in a bow tie and "owlish" glasses, he told her he was a Fulbright scholar studying China and the Soviet Union, and she eagerly interviewed him - only to find out later that he had lied and was in fact the director of the American Soybean Association. You're cute. You're a journalist. I wanted to talk to you," Foley explained. How long would you have talked to me if I told you I was in soybeans? She stomped away. But they rendezvoused again, and the drama continued. I am unhappy when he is around. I am miserable when he is gone," Bennett writes. Do I love him? Do I hate him? I can barely tell the difference. Foley was volatile, bossy, rude and a hoarder. But he was also generous, smart and thoughtful, a musician and a Renaissance man. They married, had a son and adopted a Chinese daughter. They worked, traveled, loved, fought. Then came the cancer. Bennett gracefully knits details of Foley's illness - his symptoms and the particulars of clinical trials, her own eerie observation, by microscope, of his normal kidney cells next to his cancerous ones ("tiny blue dots . . . randomly and angrily jostling against one another") - with those of the couple's family life and her jobs in Portland, New York, Philadelphia, Kentucky. She also weaves in her quest, after Foley's death, to comprehend the medical and financial information she was too harried to deal with when he was sick. Back then, with insurance provided by her employer, she paid a small share of the often impenetrable bills. Finally she studied the charges. Foley's first hospitalization was invoiced at $10,595, including $661 a day for the bed; his second, to remove his colon, at $44,626. Then his kidney was extracted: a $25,000 charge. Of that amount, Bennett paid a mere $209.87. Her insurance covered more, though not nearly all, of the cost - another problem with the system, says Bennett, who writes that payers and providers bargain "like car salesmen or Chinese vendors - naming ridiculous prices that have no bearing on reality," while the people and employers footing the bill remain in the dark. And these early amounts paled compared with what followed. Foley had 76 CAT scans priced from $550 to $3,232. "Since none of us - Terence and me included - had to account for the cost of these procedures," she writes, "all of us, doctors and patients alike, could casually afford to pop them like cherry Twizzlers." During one four-day hospital stay, at least 27 people visited Foley's room, nine of them doctors, who often asked the same questions and ran identical tests, then contradicted one another or failed to convey crucial information. For three years when they weren't even treating the cancer (just "watching and waiting"), Foley's medical charges were $36,000 for eight clinic visits for scans. Hospice care at the end was billed at $14,022 a day. Yet "The Cost of Hope" is not a polemic against the medical industry, even if Bennett underscores its numerous flaws. She acknowledges that doctors and expensive drugs often extend lives, and she admits her own irrationality and refusal to lose hope even when Foley was near death. Still, she asks: "What if Terence and I were able to see more clearly some of the costs? . . . Would we have been able to make wiser choices? Less expensive choices? In an era of furious debate over health insurance - in a country where spending on health care constitutes 17 percent of our economy, with more than a quarter of all care occurring in the last two years of people's lives - these are important questions. And while Bennett doesn't always have answers, she vividly presents the startling price and the occasional payoffs of hope, which buys us, at best, the simple "dailiness of our lives." Cathi Hanauer's third novel, "Gone," was published last month.