Episode 031: You Are Not A Patient
Aug 19, 2018•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Episode description
When you’re done with treatment, when you’re hopefully done with cancer, you don’t want to put yourself under too much pressure. You want to have realistic expectations and look after yourself emotionally, physically and socially and connect with the people you care about. That’s really what we’re talking about today with Alene:
Knowing your rights as a patient
Approaching survivorship as a wellness opportunity
The importance of connecting with other cancer patients and survivors
Find the right physical activity after cancer
How to take the recovery process into your hands
and much, much more!
Links
Navigating the C: A Nurse Charts the Course for Cancer Survivorship Care
Cancer Harbors
Episode 025: How To Stop Cancer From Running Your Life
Full Transcript
Joe: Alene, listen, you’ve been an oncology nurse, you’ve seen a lot of folks go through treatment. In your experience, what are the biggest myths and misconceptions that people have around cancer?
Alene: Well, one of the biggest misconceptions on the part of patients, people who go through treatment is that they think that as soon as treatment is done, that they’re going to feel better. They don’t really have any idea of what the recovery process is going to be like. What happens is, they’ll get done with treatment and after a few weeks, they think, “Well, when am I going to start to feel better?” Then this drags on for months. They do start to recover in some ways, but in other ways, there’s still a lot of fatigue, there are a lot of things that need to heal.
The thing is that people don’t understand that when treatment is over, and the cancer is gone, it doesn’t mean that you’re done. I think people focus so hard on getting right of the cancer because that’s what you think. It’s like, get this out of me, I want to be cancer-free. In the process of doing that, it uses a lot of your body’s resources going through treatment and healing from whatever they do in the treatment. Also, a lot of people, especially people who have not had cancer will equate cancer with death.
There’s that burden, that mental burden of fear. Which is a legitimate fear, but it’s not necessarily – more people survive much longer now and it’s not the same as it used to be. I think in general there are misconceptions on the part of people going through cancer and cancer treatment and then the people around them. They have their own set of misconceptions, too.
Joe: Cool. If we look at people around them, what sort of false beliefs, yes, or maybe misconceptions people have around cancer that maybe their caregivers or maybe their friends or family or co-workers? I know that in a way from experience, you feel like you’re almost branded with something. That you’re treated in a different way.
Alene: Yes. I think to back up for a second, I think that there’s this cancer literacy. This idea that knowing enough about cancer to have a working knowledge of it when you have to encounter it. Whether it’s in yourself or it’s someone you know, there’s so much misinformation out there. I think a lot of people think that once the person is done with treatment that they’re going to just bounce right back and go back to doing what they did before. They don’t realise that the person might have a completely different outlook on life.
It changes people in so many ways. I think that people who don’t have cancer but they’re watching someone else go through it, they have no idea of the transformation that’s going on inside the person. Mentally, physically, emotionally. All these other things that have changed. I think that for the people who don’t have cancer, what they really need to do is ask the person who does or did have cancer and not assume anything. Their assumptions are most likely going to be wrong.
Joe: I think this transformation,
