Giving Back

Or helping yourself while you help others. After going through cancer, or other nasty medical misadventure, you are traumatized, and, as in the words of Arlo Guthrie:" ...you get injected, inspected, detected, infected, ... "You do not have fun for many months as you watch your hair fall out, your blood counts go up and down. You also follow your tumor markers more than the stock market, try to figure out how to get rid of your ' chemo pallor ' , and lighten up any surgical scars. At the end you feel like you have been dragged through a swamp, up a mountain, and under the proverbial bus. You spend a lot of time trying to find the rumored " new normal " and crawl around dealing with PTSD. At the end, you are you again but not the same. There is a lot of coping involved and it doesn ' t end overnight.Since my second cancer diagnosis I have spent more time trying to cope than I have ever done anything else in my life. One thing that has been very helpful for me, because of all the cancer crap I have had to deal with in my life, has been to give back and help other people who are coping with cancer - or just plain ' giving back ' . In the past three weeks or so I have been connected with three people who are coping with cancer. They are completely disconnected from each other. But I am trying to help them cope. How can I help them? I am not a doctor. I am not a medical person at all and do not claim to have any medical or psych/social training. But I do have experi...
Source: Caroline's Breast Cancer Blog - Category: Cancer & Oncology Tags: cancer bonds cancer support coping giving back Source Type: blogs