VIDEO

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Living with Cancer—Dealing with Anger and the Question “Why Me?”

2021

When being diagnosed with cancer, it is easy to feel anger or self-pity, but I have never allowed myself to dwell on these negatives.

01:36 min

Depression

Feelings of depression are common when patients and family members are coping with cancer. It's normal to feel sadness and grief. Dreams, plans, and the future may seem uncertain.

Article
American Cancer Society
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The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care

A week after her forty-first birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer.

Book
Anne Boyer
2025
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The Big Ordeal

Coping with cancer is hard. It is an emotional ordeal as well as a physical one, with known and somewhat predictable psychological responses. And yet, patients often feel isolated and alone when dealing with the stress, anxiety, depression, and existential crises so typical with a cancer diagnosis.

Book
Cynthia Hayes
2025
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Coping with Cancer: DBT Skills to Manage Your Emotions—and Balance Uncertainty with Hope

This compassionate book presents dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), a proven psychological intervention that Marsha M. Linehan developed specifically for the impossible situations of life--and which she and Elizabeth Cohn Stuntz now apply to the unique challenges of cancer for the first time.

Book
Elizabeth Cohn Stuntz, Marsha M. Linehan
2025
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Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

Diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2008, Susan Gubar underwent radical debulking surgery, an attempt to excise the cancer by removing part or all of many organs in the lower abdomen.

Book
Susan Gubar
2013
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Reading and Writing Cancer: How Words Heal

Elaborating upon her “Living with Cancer” column in the New York Times, Susan Gubar helps patients, caregivers, and the specialists who seek to serve them. In a book both enlightening and practical, she describes how the activities of reading and writing can right some of cancer’s wrongs.

Book
Susan Gubar
2016
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The Anger of Cancer

I often must remind myself that anger needs to be understood as the flip side of the roiling fear that cancer instills in patients and also in caregivers.

Article
Susan Gubar
2016
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What Cancer Takes Away

When I got sick, I warned my friends: Don’t try to make me stop thinking about death.

Article
Anne Boyer
2019
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Seeing Red: Coping with Anger During Cancer

Coping with anger during cancer can be difficult. And although anger is commonly regarded as a negative emotion, it can have advantages for cancer patients.

Article
Heather L. Van Epps
2012
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Coping with Anger

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.

Article
Cancer.net
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Acceptance