After Cancer: Pick Up Your Life Cancer is one of the most terrible afflictions of the modern age. In fact, in developed countries as many as one in three women and one in two men will be diagnosed with cancer. This statistic may shock you, but the situation is not as grim as it used to be. There are new drugs developed and researched even as you are reading this by companies such as https://www.odonate.com/. What’s more, there are plenty of websites and organizations which offer support and help with dealing with the diagnosis and treatment.

However, what happens once your treatment is over and you are ready to return to your normal life? How do you go about doing that? Some people find it easy and have no problems returning to everything they had left behind when they started the cancer treatment. Others, however, need some help and guidance. Here are some helpful guidelines.

Anxiety

Daily or weekly visits to the hospital during the treatment may have seemed like torture during the treatment, but once they are over, patients often feel like they have stopped fighting the cancer. They fear that their inactivity in the battle against cancer may result in recurrence.

Integration into the Family

Seeing how cancer treatments tend to go on for weeks or months, and cancer patients are significantly weakened by the treatment, chances are that their chores and roles in the family have been redistributed to other family members.

Once the treatment is over, however, the patient needs to reintegrate into the family and reassume their role. This may cause some problems, since other family members may not feel like the patient is quite ready for the tasks. Talking with family members and making a plan is the best policy since everyone gets a say in how the family functions.

Emotions

One of the basic human instincts is to repress fear and other emotions in moments of extreme danger. That’s why you are able to think rationally in certain dangerous situations, and you feel the fear and panic only when it is all over.

It is similar with many cancer patients, they repress their negative emotions for the duration of the treatment so that they can be focused on beating the cancer. However, once it is over, all the emotions can suddenly reappear. This is normal, since you have been through a big trauma. However, you should consider what these emotions are doing to your family.

Once again, the best way to solve this problem is to talk to your family, but if your emotional problems persist, you should consider getting professional help, either from support groups or from therapists.

The Possibility of Cancer Recurrence

One of the hardest things to learn to live with is the uncertainty. You can’t know whether your cancer will return, and that takes a mental toll on people. However, studies have shown that the fear of recurrence decreases over time, so you should just give it time. That is not to say, however, that you should leave everything to chance.

You should have regular check-ups, to ensure that the cancer doesn’t return. And even if it does return, it is always much better to catch it early on.

Returning to Work

The last and probably the hardest step in your return to normal life is returning to work, not only physically, but emotionally as well. Most people tend to feel a lot weaker and require more breaks than they did before. It would be ideal to return to work gradually, part time at first and then full time when you feel capable and ready.

The emotional part of returning to work can be even more problematic, since your colleagues will likely ask you about your cancer, so if you are not ready to talk about it just yet, it may lead to some contention. Try to explain that you are not quite ready to talk about it and that you would rather change the subject.

Even though beating cancer is a long and difficult task, your fight doesn’t end there, because you need to get back out there with a new and positive perspective, which can be just as hard as beating cancer. However, with enough time and understanding, you can do it.