It’s a funny thing: Suddenly everyone we know knows someone newly diagnosed with cancer. Maybe this was happening all around us before we entered cancerland, back when we were unscathed, back before we spoke the language. Back in the Old Country. Now somehow we’ve become greeters here. It seems that every week, we are welcoming new immigrants to this terrifyingly foreign, intimate land of hidden quicksand and sudden grace.
We aren’t very accomplished guides here. We just arrived ourselves last week. But that is how people survive in cancerland: we take one another’s hands, we show each other the places where, so far, the ground has borne us up. We describe the landscape so new immigrants don’t bump their shins quite so often in the dark.
It is in this spirit that I’m going to start compiling the little, pragmatic suggestions people have sent our way. May they offer someone else a few stepping stones across the confounding terrain.
My aim here is simply to compile the tips people have offered us, and a few of our own, in one easy-to-find spot. For comprehensive information, there are tons of cancer resources out there: ask your doctor and your librarian for help finding solid sources.
So here you are: a few concrete suggestions people have shared with us, and a few things we’ve discovered. I’ve also added it to the Links section to the right, as “Tips and Suggestions.” You are welcome to comment with any suggestions of your own, and I’ll try to incorporate them.
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Thank you muchly for all the advice. May we never, any of us, have occasion to look at it again. Inshallah!
The reason I liked reading the section on dealing with doctors and others is because you (both) sound like your gracious, buoyant, funny, open-hearted self(ves). You went into this scary place with all of the powers you already have and brought a bit more humanity to that place in doing so.
Like you say in your list of suggestions, it is very important to keep track of everything and to be your own advocate. My partner carried a huge binder to every appointment and asked for copies of every test result and lab report. Sometimes we would arrive at a doctor appointment and find that they had not yet received a copy of the latest numbers and – voila! – Mary could pull her own copy. The medical system is sometimes very haphazard about mailing out results to each other’s offices.
Cancer is it’s own world. I cannot count the number of phone calls we’ve gotten from people asking Mary’s advice about their own new diagnosis or a friend or relative’s diagnosis.
It’s a good thing to be able to talk to someone who’s been through it recently. When considering reconstructive surgery, my partner got referrals to call several women who had & had not had the additional surgery. It was helpful for her to be able to ask frank questions – not to a surgeon (although she did that too) – but to a woman who had lived through the process. (In the end she decided not to have new boobs and has not regretted her choice.)