Everybody has bad days, but nobody tells you how to handle them. The times where you feel hopeless, anxious or paranoid. When you feel angry that cancer will always be a part of your life, scared that it may come back or frustrated that side effects from treatment might never go away.
Young Adult Cancer
I hope you will take a moment to write down what you want your 2017 to be. And whether you are in the middle of treatment, completing treatment, or newly diagnosed, trust that you will get to a place where you can say, “I'm happy, and I am alive.”
With only a few days until Christmas, I’m doing everything I can to channel that strength and use it to begin 2017 on a grateful and optimistic note.
There are certain times of year when my cancer story makes me feel incredibly isolated. There’s the time surrounding April 14, the day I was diagnosed, July 29, the day I was deemed “in remission” and, the one I’ve experienced most recently, the month of October.
After a recent appointment at Roswell Park, I was suddenly awash with emotion, almost on the verge of tears. My brain was flooded with the enormity of my entire experience, starting of course with the brutal reality that I was diagnosed with breast cancer at 36.
For every amazing, caring friend, there’s another who has drifted away. The one who wholeheartedly promised, “if you need anything, I’m here,” and wasn’t. There are just some friends, for whatever reason, who won’t be there for you, even if you really want them or need them in your corner.
FOMO, the abbreviated slang meaning “fear of missing out,” is a huge mental and emotional side effect of being a young adult cancer survivor and represents just a sliver of the unique challenges we have to face during and well after the fight of our lives.
If you’re a woman under 40, you’re probably not thinking about menopause. But for young women who have had cancer, treatment-induced ovarian failure – often referred to as “chemopause” – is a very realistic concern.
For me, the negative results meant we still couldn’t pinpoint what was wrong, and I'd have to be poked and prodded with more needles.
Having such a simple question asked a certain way can really humanize you during a time when normalcy seems like the distant past. I was still Mary. I still had the same parents, same car and same clothes. Why should being a little extra sick make a difference?
Buffalo native, Roy Vongtama, MD, is a board-certified radiation oncologist, a working actor, and an executive producer. His impressive yet unconventional career is the result of an unwillingness to settle. “I refused to believe I could only be one thing,” he said.
To kick off National Young Adult Cancer Awareness Week (NYACAW) I’m headed to Roswell Park’s Annual Young Adult Wellness Retreat this Saturday to speak with patients and survivors about important topics that impact their lives.