Cancer Survivor - Free Your Mind: Distractions Can Be Good

When I was first diagnosed with cancer, it was all I could think about it. It occupied my every thought when I was awake and it woke me up in the night. I couldn't believe these doctors and nurses were really talking to me about cancer. It didn't seem real. And then, really, how could you not be obsessed with your just-discovered cancer, when your life is suddenly all about doctors appointments and MRI’s, radiation and chemo. And all the old cancer stereotypes flood into your mind: “I’m gonna be bald. I’m gonna be sick. I’m gonna... die.”

First, I want to tell you that some of the old stereotypes are not relevant to new treatments. While hair loss is still a side effect of many chemotherapies, the nausea is nothing like it was even five years ago. There are so many effective anti-nausea agents available now. I used to take a prescription called Emend when I was doing my 8 cycles of Cisplatin-Gemzar and I never threw up once during the entire 6-month treatment. When I did the 6 months of Taxotere, I didn't need Emend; the anti-nausea fluids they gave me in the IV were enough. Actually, that particular drug was so easy on my stomach and affected my energy level so little compared to the Ciplatin-Gemzar that I used to refer to it as soda pop. Of course, everyone responds differently, and some will be affected more than others by the same chemicals, but all the chemo nurses will tell you, it’s a whole different world for chemotherapy since the new anti-nausea drugs came along.

Another thing is this: If you have been given a horrible prognosis like me it’s hard not to be resentful of those people in the chemo room who had been given a better prognosis. But the truth is, these “enviable” people have universally confirmed that even when the statistics are much better than yours, a cancer diagnosis is frightening and weighs heavily on a person’s mind. And believe it or not, there is always someone who is worse off than you are. At first, I thought I had to be the worst, but I talked to a lot of people in the chemo rooms and I was not only able to find people with worse “sob stories” than mine, but I also found that many of these people had long outlived their doctor’s original prediction. Survival statistics are, by their very nature, old, as we can’t know who has survived five years until those five years pass. The statistics relevant to YOU won’t exist until 2011, and even then YOU ARE NOT A STATISTIC. Everyone knows that a new drug can completely change the outcome of a person's treatment, and we are on the horizon of a new age in cancer treatment. Tarceva, which is the drug that has put me into a complete remission, was not even FDA approved when I was diagnosed in May 2004. When I began the drug, my cancer had metastasized to my brain. Even the company which created the drug, Genentech, didn't know if it could pass through the blood-brain barrier and take care of the tiny lesions which were growing there. It turns out. it can! There are more than 400 targeted therapies (agents which attack only the cancer cells and not your healthy cells) in clinical trials today. Ten years ago, there were less than a dozen. Looking to five year survival statistics for your "chances" is not only destructive to your mental state, it's also highly inaccurate.

I learned that there isn’t just "beating cancer" and "not beating cancer." The new goal for oncologists and researchers for difficult-to-treat cancers is managing cancer as a chronic disease. Many people I talked to who are outliving their prognosis are not actually free of cancer; they’re still fighting cancer, true, but they still have a life. They have graduations and weddings they go to. As we talked, they smiled and laughed, they told me their stories when it looked hopeless for me, and most of them, to look at them, you would never know there was anything wrong at all. How can that be? you think. Fighting cancer is no kind of life. I’d rather be dead. Well, that may be what you thought before you had cancer, and it may be what you think, if you’ve just been diagnosed. (by “just diagnosed”, I mean in the last 6 months.) But as you become accustomed to the fact that you have cancer, you will be able to think about other things. You’ll be able to laugh again. Your sex drive will come back, even though it probably feels like it died the minute you heard those horrible words. Give yourself some time to feel bad. To feel sorry for yourself, to be furious with the world, with God, with your own body. But then, as some time goes on, you owe it to yourself not to waste the time you have being miserable, whether that time is long or not. Let yourself think about other things. . . Free Your Mind