By Barbara Tako — 2018
Develop resilience for those moments in life where it suddenly becomes your turn to make lemons into lemonade.
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CLEAR ALL
With each diagnosis, knowing her life hung in the balance, she was “stunned, then anguished” and astonished by “how much energy it takes to get from the bad news to actually starting on the return path to health.”
When I got sick, I warned my friends: Don’t try to make me stop thinking about death.
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A month ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out—a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver.
In the past four years, Bruce Mead-e has undergone two major surgeries, multiple rounds of radiation and chemotherapy to treat his lung cancer. Yet in all that time, doctors never told him or his husband whether the cancer was curable — or likely to take Mead-e’s life.
It is extremely difficult for anyone, especially young people in their 20s and 30s, to be told that their treatment(s) haven’t worked. If the cancer you have continues to progress despite treatment, it may be called end-stage cancer.
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.
This is written for the person with advanced cancer, but it can be helpful to the people who care for, love, and support this person, too.
An interview with Rick Fields on living with cancer.