What if your long-distance love comes to town at the precise time you’re recovering from hip-replacement surgery? Or heart surgery, where too much excitement could be downright dangerous to your health? What might intimacy look like with a fully casted broken leg?

These questions were posed during a girlfriends’ weekend beach retreat, and voila! Kama Suture was born. Borrowing from the Kama Sutra, the ancient love manual that teaches various positions for congress suited for impossibly fit bodies, Kama Suture offers up hope for the rest of us.

The 54 people interviewed tell their stories of how they climbed back in the saddle after health problems, injuries or surgery got in the way, people experiencing head-on collisions, cancer, bad knees, hernias, sepsis, ski wipeouts, bike accidents, and more.

In Kama Suture: Love in the Time of Stitches, Scars, and Surgery, Becca Haussmann and Bae Bliss show how ailing paramours can keep their eye on the prize and carry on. As shown time and time again in life and in love, where there’s a will there’s a way.