Step 7: Look Forward

Remission, Recurrence, Planning

Letting go of cancer victim identity
While hearing that you had cancer was the scariest news you'd ever received, hearing you don't have it is scary in another way. Its scary because you had to make a career out of finding a cure for yourself. Now, in effect, you'íve been pink slipped, phased out of the identity you were forced to adopt. Who am I now if not a cancer patient? Now you may feel empty and scared, without purpose.

There also will be relationships that come to an end the nurses at the treatment center who adopted you and took such good care of you, the oncologist who handled your endless questions with patience and understanding, the nice librarian who helped you figure out the Guide to Periodicals. Even your relationship with your advocate will diminish.

Feeling a deep sense of loss is normal and talking to a psychologist or other mental health professional may help you realize just that. You will be encouraged to mourn the losses. Perhaps you may want to show your appreciation to all these people with gifts or cards or flowers. You may want to write about them in your journals or put together an album of photographs of all of them. This is not morbid. It rather honors the time you went through and the fact that you accomplished one helluva feat!

Living with uncertainty
The what-ifs of cancer can be debilitating. Living under the cloud of unknowing is its own source of stress. Did the surgery get it all? Will it come back? If so, when? What about the chemo? How bad will the side effects be? How long will they last? Will it work after all that? Will I ever return to a normal healthy happy life again? You'll hear good news one day, bad the next. Fear, hope, depression, optimism, futility itís a dizzying emotional roller coaster. The future could bring remission, relapse, recurrence, cure, death.

Of one thing you can be certain: uncertainty. Uncertainty implies that a situation is out of our control, and we know that when that happens we feel powerless. Never a good feeling. We could draw some solace from realizing our doctors are just as uncertain as we are about what causes cancer, who gets it and why, what treatments work, how to cure it. Not surprisingly, that is no solace. In fact, your doctor's uncertainty probably just adds to the stress. But there are ways you can alleviate some of the stress of the uncertainty.