By Lisa Stein — 2008
A photographer and actress is diagnosed with tumors in her liver and lungs, but keeps her spirits up and taps resources to make the disease manageable.
Read on www.scientificamerican.com
CLEAR ALL
Understanding the patterns of reaction to a prolonged illness with perhaps years of remission and a significant chance of being cured will help you put your emotional survival in focus while your doctor concentrates on your physical survival.
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After treatment ends, one of the most common concerns survivors have is that the cancer will come back. The fear of recurrence is very real and entirely normal. Although you cannot control whether the cancer returns, you can control how much the fear of recurrence affects your life.
It wasn’t until I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from my urologist who informed me that I had prostate cancer that I started to panic. It took me a few seconds to comprehend what he was saying. He then ticked off a list of things I had to do.
Just as cancer affects your physical health, it can bring up a wide range of feelings you’re not used to dealing with. It can also make existing feelings seem more intense. They may change daily, hourly, or even minute to minute.
Many people living with cancer experience anger. Often, the feeling arises when receiving a cancer diagnosis. But it can develop any time throughout treatment and survivorship.
By acknowledging and honoring any feeling—no matter how “unacceptable” we might have previously judged it to be—we create space for its opposite.