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← Return to Post treatment depression
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Merry Christmas zzonner! The holidays come and go with the same joy as precancer when you can finally put the diagnosis and treatment side effects on a back burner. It takes a while. My first surgery was over 11 years ago at Mayo Clinic Rochester. Followup chemo/radiation closer to home at U of Michigan ( tough for an Ohio State grad ) started a month after surgery. The end of treatment left me feeling like I was teetering on the edge of an abyss, with nothing there to catch me. Suddenly we weren't actively fighting cancer any more, but just waiting for it to show itself again. Luckily I knew about an immune augmentation clinic in the Bahamas that had a darn good record in prolonging lives of people with cancer. I started that shortly after the end of radiation and once again I felt I was doing everything I could to prevent a recurrence. Diet and lifestyle changes and simply working on my own attitude of gratitude have all helped. I'm quite the optimist so that helps, and this has gotten me through 4 metastases and 3 more surgeries. At 70, you're never sure if the slowing down is due to age or your chronic illness and treatment but you listen to your body and keep kicking the can down the road. I know others have sought therapy to get through the post treatment period, but I just did some reading. Favorite books which helped me regain my positive attitude: How Not to Be My Patient by Ed Creagan MD, a former palliative care physician at Mayo with many great suggestions for life changes, Radical Remissions by Kelly Turner, and her other book Radical Hope. For me, reading about others who have gone the cancer route and continue to live a good life helps my attitude a lot. The gratitude exercise of waking each morning and thinking of 4 things you are grateful for then again as you go to bed what 4 things happened that day to be thankful for. Just enjoying a quiet cup of coffee in a peaceful setting can be one of them. Congratulations on having NED right now! That is certainly worth celebrating. It takes time and some work on your part to get to your new normal where you can mostly enjoy life and place that cancer diagnosis in a dusty corner until your next scan blows the dust off again. THINK POSITIVE and never give up hope. .....Susan
Replies to "Merry Christmas zzonner! The holidays come and go with the same joy as precancer when you..."
Thanks for this, Susan. I'm new to the forum and the disease. I was diagnosed w/ adenocarcinoma, stage 1b in October 2023 (lower esophagus).
Instead of going straight into surgery, I chose a short-term (8 weeks) chemo and radiation stint suggested by my oncologists. This reduced tumour size remarkably, but since my entire esophagus was going to be removed, this radiation/chemo stint was designed (as I understand it) to attack any potential, unseen, small, groups of cancer cells either floating around my body looking for a place to land and start their violence, or have already done so - but either way need to be liquidated!
As far as the original poster's outreach with respect to depression coming on after the high-stakes efforts are in a comfortable lull... I can relate.
My sense is that it's a kind of PTSD.
I've had my esophagectomy now, it was 6-weeks ago. Recovery has been pretty tough and I had to be readmitted for a week with uncontrollable vomiting, but I'm home again and getting it under control.
But this has of course been a momentous event in my life and required the piling on of new resources and new people at a near constant rate. Decisions all carried such terrible import and the veil between life and death became so thin as to have become unseen at many times.
But I can see the teeny light at the end of the tunnel now and distant though it may still appear to be, it's enough that it occurs to me that the emotional, and psychological pace that I have been keeping is likely unsustainable, even though I got used to living that way.
As a result I feel a genuine sense of 'let down' over the idea that my job is to return back to the 'grind', back to the anonymity of a worker ant. Cancer made life so simple in so many ways, and as life's complexity returns, if it returns (I'm not in the clear by any means), I can forsee myself having to make just as large an adjustment "coming down from cancer" as I did going up. Perhaps simply acknowledging this as a huge job, separate from the others, can be enough to move one on from depression to... frustration? lol.
I hope my rambling hasn't offended any rules or good taste. It is difficult to discuss this topic and I am grateful to you for doing so. Kudos mate, w/ love from Canada's West coast.
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Merry Christmas Sue!! Your response really resonates with where I am. I felt compelled to shout out to the world and finding I am not alone is comforting. I have not had much luck with therapy, I think I am smarter than them, lol. I will read your recommended books and work my plan. Thanks again.