Simple Cooking For The Low-Iodine Diet
Thyroid cancer diagnoses rates are increasing, especially among young women. Many thyroid cancer patients undergo radioactive iodine treatment, a.k.a. RAI-131. I have done so twice and learned along the way about how to cope with the seemingly bizarre low-iodine diet.
When I was going through preparation for radioactive iodine treatment, the list of permitted foods on the low-iodine diet seemed grim. Low-iodine diet cookbooks only made me feel worse; I am simple, lazy cook, adverse to complicated recipes and substitutions. Plus, I didn’t want my shopping lists, recipes, or meals to remind me that I was...
Source: Everything Changes - April 2, 2013 Category: Cancer Authors: Kairol Rosenthal Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs
All about cancer and writing.
I love getting emails from readers and have recently received lots of emails about becoming an author, publishing, and writing about cancer. This is a favorite subject of mine. Yet, instead of crafting a new post on young adult cancer and writing, I decided to scavenge the archives of my blog and share a round up of my previous posts on the subject so you can reference them all in one place. Happy reading (and writing).
Does making art help you deal with illness?
Has poetry helped?
Addicted to your illness?
The importance of writing for yourself.
How to start writing about your cancer?
Should you write a cancer book?...
Source: Everything Changes - March 26, 2013 Category: Cancer Authors: Kairol Rosenthal Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs
Moving beyond cancer brain fog.
I wrote an article for the New York Times about cancer and brain fog. It was really helpful to out myself as someone who is, at times, incredibly insecure about her mental and intellectual capacities post-cancer treatment. It blew me away to read the comments section and see that I was not alone in adjusting to post-cancer brain fog.
Many cancer patients have confessed to me a desire to go back to school, but a fear that their scrambled brains cannot handle it. I get it. So I recently decided to risk fumbling through a college course in the privacy of my own home via a MOOC (massive open line course). I took a fr...
Source: Everything Changes - March 12, 2013 Category: Cancer Authors: Kairol Rosenthal Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs
The importance of writing for yourself.
I did not have a public blog until after I was done with treatment and had already written the entire manuscript for my book. I have a lot of grim and foul thoughts about cancer and its impact on my life. These thoughts are not on this blog. They are in 12 spiral bound notebooks in a big storage box in my closet. And I intend for them to stay there.
When I was going through treatment I never thought about journaling as a task. The word alone conjures images of haggard ladies sitting around a new age bookstore with purple notepads on their laps scribbling experiences that I’d rather not k...
Source: Everything Changes - March 5, 2013 Category: Cancer Authors: Kairol Rosenthal Tags: Uncategorized cancer authors cancer blogs cancer books narrative medicine publishing therapy writing Source Type: blogs
Why your smoking matters to me.
Camel Lights were my brand my sophomore year of college. I lived in New York City, was dancing, reading poetry, and feeling very cool at the Hungarian Pastry Shop with a cigarette in my hand. I was one of the people I would now like to scream at for polluting the air.
I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at age 27. (Completely unrelated to my year of off-and-on smoking in college.) I had surgery and two rounds of radioactive iodine treatment, none of which was targeted at my lungs. Still, I have become extremely sensitive to smoke since my cancer care began. And, I now live in Philadelphia, which has the highest...
Source: Everything Changes - February 26, 2013 Category: Cancer Authors: Kairol Rosenthal Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs
Cancer and family planning: A guy’s perspective.
For my book Everything Changes, I interviewed a young adult cancer survivor whose body could no longer produce eggs nor carry a child. When she met her husband, he was set on having children with his genetic material. So, they found an egg donor and hired a separate woman as a surrogate who carried the children. They now have twins, the surrogate is in their lives as an aunt, and while the survivor loves her children, she still has some residual emotional challenges about how they were conceived.
What interests me as much as the decisions cancer survivors make in response to their complex family planning needs is the...
Source: Everything Changes - February 19, 2013 Category: Cancer Authors: Kairol Rosenthal Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs
Surviving the Low Iodine Diet
I have had two separate rounds of radioactive iodine treatment for thyroid cancer. I won’t kid you. The low iodine diet is no picnic. It contains an odd list of limiting foods. And, it is a royal pain in the ass to think about fixing special foods when you are dealing with the anxiety of cancer and the fatigue of RAI preparation. But, there is hope.
I want to share with you ways I found to make this diet simpler, less taxing, and even delicious. I’m starting a low-iodine diet cooking series on my blog. Today is the first installment and covers basics tips on how to organize your food, fridge, a...
Source: Everything Changes - February 12, 2013 Category: Cancer Authors: Kairol Rosenthal Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs
How to start writing about your cancer?
Yesterday I received a comment on my post ‘Should You Write A Cancer Book?’ from an osteosarcoma survivor named Tamara wrote: “I would love to write a book and share my experience with those that are just starting the journey but I don’t know how to start.”
Though cancer is a monumental experience that we’d like to convey to others, our written story is only as compelling as our words make it. More important than how to start writing about cancer is to start knowing yourself as a writer.
Take time to experiment and discover your writing style, tone, and creative process. Do you want to c...
Source: Everything Changes - February 5, 2013 Category: Cancer Authors: Kairol Rosenthal Tags: Uncategorized agents author daily writing practice publishing houses self-publishing Source Type: blogs
Why I Don’t Watch TV News
I don’t watch television news. The reasons are many. Here are the ones that relate to my cancer:
As a young adult thyroid cancer patient, my immune system is vulnerable. The sniffles to someone else usually lands me in bed for two weeks. I am hyper vigilant about my health. At times even a hypochondriac. (See my post Scared of Every Little Ache and Pain.) I will likely always have some amount of hypochondria, but I have learned that to control and reduce my anxiety around illness.
There is needful worrying about my health. It is perfectly natural for me to be scared about an upcoming scan. There is also n...
Source: Everything Changes - January 22, 2013 Category: Cancer Authors: Kairol Rosenthal Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs
Free Cancer Research Tool: Use It!
In preparation for appointments with my doctors, I search Pubmed.gov, a free online database of nearly every medical journal and article in print. I read articles related to my cancer, print them out, and share them with my docs to review new options for my care or confirm we are on the right track. As a young adult cancer patient, I have been doing this for nearly a decade.
I enter a search term into pubmed.gov. (Here are some general examples of search terms: ‘tamoxifen resistance’ or ‘radioactive iodine uptake’ or ‘testicular protheses’.) Next I click on the title of an art...
Source: Everything Changes - January 15, 2013 Category: Cancer Authors: Kairol Rosenthal Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs
Gun Violence and Young Adult Cancer?
I was diagnosed with cancer at age 27 and have gone on to become a major advocate in the young adult cancer community. It is truly incredible to see how many people rally around the cause of cancer when they or a loved one is touched by this killer disease. Gun violence is a disease too. And one that can be controlled a lot more easily than cancer. With gun violence we don’t need to spend over three decades unlocking the secrets of science. We simply need strict gun policies, enforcement, and regulation. Gun shootings and gun deaths are preventable. I didn’t beat cancer only to get gunned dow...
Source: Everything Changes - January 8, 2013 Category: Cancer Authors: Kairol Rosenthal Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs
