What does cancer treatment entail.
While cancer treatment differs for every patient, some aspects are universal—every part of life changes after a cancer diagnosis. Every day social dynamics change at school, work, and home. Thus, it can be challenging to stop cancer from overtaking your entire identity, especially due to the drastic physical effects of treatment.
This sudden change in body image, ability, and lifestyle undoubtedly causes serious distress. Anxiety about hospitalization, medical procedures, unfamiliar medications, and whether treatment works causes further anger and fear. Uncertainty about the future and leaving family behind can become a harsh reality. Through these cycles of self-doubt and fear, negativity and depression can take hold over these patients who feel helpless in their current reality. They exterminate hope in an already dire situation.
Not only do these feelings result in emotional turmoil, but they also present themselves as physical burdens. The many physical side effects vary for each patient undergoing cancer treatment, but every side effect is unusual, painful, and terrifying. Gut-wrenching nausea, excruciating mouth sores, and changes in taste make it impossible to enjoy food. Shortness of breath, skin irritation, bone pain, and nerve damage cause intense discomfort. Minute physical movements may feel like running a marathon. Ongoing pain and nausea require drugs that cause extreme drowsiness and brain fog, which makes it challenging to form thoughts and communicate. Constant fatigue makes it impossible to leave the bed or do anything enjoyable.
Everyone understands that cancer treatment is awful, but until it is personally experienced, many do not realize how brutal it truly is.
Here are some books that further explain this topic:
Braving Chemo: What to Expect, How to Prepare and How to Get Through It by Beverly A. Zavaleta
The Chemotherapy Survival Guide: Everything You Need to Know to Get Through Treatment by Judith McKay
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
