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.
Adult women, starting at age 20, are encouraged to perform a breast self-exam at least once a month. The key to a successful self-exam is consistency.
Chemotherapy is tough. It’s a long and tedious process that sometimes includes curveballs before getting better. Fortunately, there are things you can do to make your chemotherapy treatment easier to navigate.