After Cancer - A Guide to Your New Life (Paperback)

This is the first book written by a doctor for the layperson that addresses the medicine, the practical issues, and the psychosocial elements of recovery after cancer treatment. The author, a cancer survivor herself, understands that surviving cancer is more than just killing cancer cells and getting through treatment. Patients must deal with the emotional, social, spiritual, and financial fallout of a cancer diagnosis. By helping survivors understand that they can't go back to where they were before cancer, she liberates them to move forward to a different, "new normal". Writing in a reader-friendly, question-and-answer format, Dr. Wendy Harpham addresses a wide range of issues realistically yet hopefully. Among them are understanding the medicine of reevaluation, follow-up, and prevention after treatment; dealing with the most common physical aftereffects of treatment; learning how to make decisions about work and school; relating to friends and family; helping children deal with parents' cancer; and coping with the practicalities of living wills and insurance. An important section on post-cancer fatigue will be of special interest to patients who find that exhaustion is one of the most difficult problems with which they deal.