cancer wellbeing

by Shelle Rose Charvet

“The good news is that your condition is pre-cancerous. The bad news is that it is untreatable and I strongly recommend that you have a mastectomy.”

“I’m sorry, what did you say was the good news?” The doctor’s mouth continued to flap open and closed; I know he made sounds, but the words disappeared into a vortex.

Over the last couple of years I have been in and out of crowded doctors’ waiting rooms, been pinched by mammogram machines, had needles shot into my body to remove tissue samples while I was held in a vice, had a large piece surgically taken out of me and my whole breast removed.

Luckily, my mother often came with me on doctor visits. Luckily, my friend who works at the cancer information centre showed up with a large pile of information. Luckily, my brother accompanied me through the procedures to hold my hand and get answers when my brain shut down.

“Gee, you sound really mellow after your operation.”

“I don’t do mellow. I’m still drugged.” But even in my groggy state, I realized that there must be a better way to go through this. So I thought up 10 tips for surviving the health care system.

1. Always assume that you have fallen through the cracks, unless you get proof to the contrary. No news is not good news. It may mean that someone forgot to do something. Medical care can be complicated and need a lot of co-ordination among large numbers of people.

2. Never blame anyone. Recognize that everyone working in the system is very busy and probably stressed-out. While you are only concerned with yourself, they are juggling dozens of people, or hundreds.

3. Create positive relationships with everyone who can help you. Introduce yourself to every nurse, receptionist, technician and doctor that you will need to see again. Ask them for their first name. Remember it or record it for quick reference.

Next time you see them establish rapport by using their first name and engaging them in personal chat before you get down to business. It only takes a few seconds. This will help ensure that you become more than just a file, and will give you some insight into what each person does. It also makes it easier to request things when you need to.

4. Apologize before you make a request. “I’m sorry to bother you when you are so busy, but since I hadn’t heard from you, I thought I’d better check whether you were able to make the appointment.”

Canadians naturally apologize for anything, even when we are not responsible. It’s time we learned to use the power of apology. If you say you’re sorry, you can ask for just about anything – and still be perceived as nice.

5. Take someone with you and give them a job to do. For any important meeting or procedure, take a friend or family member with you. Their job is to remain sane, create rapport and ask good questions. This way, if you lose your grip, someone else still has it.

6. Use all your contacts. Surely someone you know, knows someone who knows someone who can find out what you need. At times this may be the only way to obtain information, a second opinion or to get in to see someone quickly. If you are hesitant to use your contacts, apologize for bothering them.

7. Be prepared to do a lot of waiting. Make appointments early in the day before the doctor has a chance to get behind schedule. This way you’ll see the doctor before she/he gets tired and cranky. Just after lunch is okay too. Remember to take something you like to do in case you have to wait anyway.

8. Take everything your doctors way as information instead of gospel. Allow yourself time to think about it. Remember that medical professionals are trained to think about and discuss the worst possible scenarios. Ask them what each treatment is supposed to accomplish and repeat that message over and over to yourself to create a goal-oriented mindset within yourself. Write down your questions prior to the appointment and write down the answers – or ask your companion to do the writing.

9. Do what you need to do to stay upbeat and positive. It’s perfectly normal to feel depressed and demoralized upon hearing bad news. I’ve been through shock, numbness, denying that this could be happening, panic, anger and feeling depressed. You can let yourself feel all those things, knowing that this is how you are felling at this moment in time, and that you will move on. Continually remind yourself that you are good at healing, that you get better quickly. Notice what has improved each day and comment on it to yourself and others. While some may think this weird; you can even speak to your physical self; cheer for your immune system and thank it for sticking up for you.

10. Hang out with cheerful, upbeat and helpful people. I found it wearing having to cheer up other people when I told them I had cancer. I was also subjected to everyone’s personal dogma regarding what I should do. It ran the gamut; from slavishly following every instruction from the doctor to never believing anything the doctor says.

There is only so much sympathy you can take before you begin to believe that you ought to feel sorry for yourself. Only see people who make you feel good – who make you laugh, who get you out, who bring over lovely things to eat. If someone asks you how can they help – get them to make morale-raising food, take you to a funny movie, or bring over a good video. If depressing people want to come over, apologize and tell them you’re not up to it.

At the beginning of last year I went through several major reconstructive surgeries, some of which were quite difficult. A few months ago my 11-year-old son was diagnosed with cancer. So far, so good – the tips have helped a lot. Although, I have to admit that it’s been much harder dealing with my feelings about my son’s illness than my own. While I’m able to be positive about his healing with him, his brother and the care-givers, the challenge has been keeping myself positive when I’m alone.

I’ve been getting extra support to help me. I go to a therapist to get frustrations off my chest and insight. I shrug my shoulders and forgive myself when I forget where I’m going. I play solitaire on the computer. And I’ve discovered a great excuse to have a lot of little rewards. Where did I leave my pack of Werthers?

Permission to reprint kindly granted by Shelle Rose Charvet, of Success Strategies, Ontario, Canada.

Web: www.successtrategies.com

Tel: +1 905 639-6468

There is a PDF version of this file to download and print on the Resources page.

Image via Wikipedia

A client of mine at a cancer support group, let’s call her Mary, has been using EFT to good effect. I worked with her a little while ago about test anxiety after a call back to hospital after several years remission from breast cancer to investigate a suspicious lump. Shortly before she was due to be tested, we worked together in an EFT session reducing the fears and anxieties surrounding the test.

The test was a needle biopsy using a mammograph machine, where medical staff use a long needle through the skin to remove samples from the suspicious area, in this case behind the breast against the chest wall. The medical staff had to make several attempts before they got the tissue sample they wanted, going away and coming back a few times, while Mary had to sit still and wait.

Since she wasn’t able to move Mary couldn’t physically tap on the EFT acupuncture points so she had to imagine tapping on them instead. If you’ve had a little practice this is almost as good as tapping on the points physically.

These tests are quite stress provoking, the waiting room was full of people wringing their hands in anticipation of their test. She had been sitting serenely through the whole process and the nurse commented how calm she was.”You’re not clenching your fists or gritting your teeth. Why is that?”

Mary answered “Because I’m tapping”

“Oh I love tap dancing!”, replied the nurse brightly, “Where do you go?”

Mary had to explain that wasn’t quite what she was doing, rather that she was mentally running through the EFT procedure I had taught her, imagining tapping on the acupressure points to relieve any anxieties she may have had about the test.

Happily the test results came back negative, Mary is still in the clear.

Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) is a simple to learn process that can be used to greatly relieve the emotional aspects of cancer from diagnosis through treatment and living beyond cancer.

Here are five ways you can use EFT:

1. To help recover from difficult appointments and medical procedures so that you don’t lie awake at night reliving unpleasant news or experiences.
2. To prepare for upcoming appointments so that you can be calm, collected and resourceful rather than a bag of nerves.
3. For neutralising unhelpful beliefs about cancer and it’s treatment. Such as the often held belief that ‘cancer is a death sentence’
4. To resolve problems about different aspects of medical treatments such as needle phobias, scanner claustrophobia and anxieties about difficult medical procedures.
5. To benefit the carers and partners of cancer patients, helping manage their stress and anxiety and giving them some simple ways to help the patient through their cancer experience.

These are just a few of the ways EFT can help.

Image by franziskas garten via Flickr

If you are a cancer patient, or care for someone with cancer, you will know that you suffer not only the effects of the disease but also the EMOTIONAL stresses that come with it. fortunately There are new, EASY TO LEARN techniques WHICH can rapidly reduce the feelings of stress, anxiety and trauma associated with cancer.

As you will know after the diagnosis you may have a range of emotional stresses to cope with as well as the physical issues of the disease.

• You have to cope with stress and anxiety from the diagnosis itself.
• You may be afraid of particular treatments or diagnostic procedures, including: fear of needles or being confined in scanners. Just the thought of surgery, chemo and radiotherapy may make you feel ill.
• Perhaps you are finding it difficult to maintain a positive mental attitude through the treatment and beyond.
• Maybe you can’t cope with the side effects of some of the treatments.

• Being overwhelmed with the emotional stresses of cancer isn’t going to improve your quality of life or your chances of overcoming the disease.

Up to now stress, anxiety and trauma have usually been dealt with by reassurance, cups of tea, counselling and in some cases medication. Fortunately there are new techniques, particularly Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), that you can use to rapidly reduce the feelings of stress, anxiety and trauma.

Although it seems to be much too simple to work EFT can offer many benefits when used in this context.

• Quick and effective stress relief. Once you have EFT at your disposal you can use it very simply and easily to reduce anxiety and stress in all sorts of situations.
• You don’t have to take any pills or potions. EFT exploits the body’s own natural relaxation methods so you can get rapid relief whenever you need it.
• This approach completely supports conventional treatments, there are no adverse reactions with medication or other treatments.

EFT works beautifully alongside the traditional medical models of treatment such as chemotherapy, radiotherapy, surgery and hormone treatment. During medical intervention the patient often feels very disempowered and out of control, something is attacking them from the inside, and they are also being attacked externally. They can feel like onlookers in a war zone over which they have little say. Teaching EFT gives them a way of taking back the controls and actively engaging in their own healing process. This in itself is empowering and positive. In our experience, cancer patients are amongst the most enthusiastic tappers we know

Sue Beer & Emma Roberts,
EFT Master Practitioners working with cancer patients

How specifically can EFT help?

• You can relieve your fears and anxieties: By using EFT you can greatly reduce, even remove, the feelings of fear and anxiety that go with the experience of having cancer.The reduced level of stress can have many psychological and physical benefits.
• Neutralise the trauma of your diagnosis: For most people the initial cancer diagnosis is a traumatic experience, this is the point at which everything changes. Using EFT you can neutralise the painful memory of the diagnosis so that you can move on.
• You can neutralise the stress associated with the word cancer: Even the word ‘cancer’ can have a powerful negative effect. In earlier times the word would inspire dread, even now many people associate it with a death sentence.Neutralising the negative feeling associated with the word is a great place to start reducing the emotional impact of the disease.
• Change your negative beliefs about the illness: Many unhelpful beliefs surround cancer, for example: “Cancer is a death sentence” and “Even when it’s cured it will come back”. These beliefs interfere with the positive attitude and courage needed to cope with the illness and treatment.You can successfully neutralise these beliefs and encourage more helpful states of mind.
• Use EFT to help you manage pain or other physical symptoms: It’s well known that stress and anxiety increase the severity s of pain. Even the stress relief aspects of EFT can significantly reduce the patients experience of pain. Sometimes even other symptoms such as nausea can be relieved using EFT.
• Reduce your fears about treatment: Some of the medical procedures associated with cancer can be very intimidating. If you are afraid of needles or claustrophobic, chemotherapy and MRI scans can be as frightening as the disease itself.EFT can quickly reduce phobic and other fear responses so that you can get the treatment you need.
• Reduce your fears for the future: Even after treatment, being clear of cancer can be very frightening. What would have been simple aches and pains become signs of the cancer coming back.EFT can reduce your levels of fear and anxiety so that living without cancer can be less scary.
• Approaching death and dying if the medical treatment fails: Even if the cancer treatment is unsuccessful EFT can help you or your loved one approach death with dignity and calmness.

Important

This approach is intended to bring relief to the emotional strains of cancer it is not a substitute for good medical advice. These techniques are intended for use in conjunction with medical treatment not instead of it. While EFT has produced remarkable clinical results, it must still be considered to be in the experimental stage and thus practitioners and the public must take complete responsibility for their use of it.

A client of mine is undergoing chemotherapy. Every three weeks she gets injections of three drugs into a drip line inserted into the wrist.

The drugs have to go into the drip line because there is quite a volume of medication and the syringes holding them are big, about six inches long and an inch across, arriving in a plastic tray with the needles, tubes and other bits and pieces.

The day before her second round of chemo  she told me that just the thought of those injections was making her feel very nauseous.

She said: “The syringe is this *$!*%$# long!“. Moving her hands about two feet apart, in the style of a fisherman telling you about the one that got away.

I asked her if the syringe was that big in her mind’s eye. She told me it was. I suggested to her that she shrink that image of the syringe down to it’s actual size. She did this easily. Commenting that the syringe now fitted in the tray.

Then she told me that her nausea linked to the treatment had completely disappeared!

This is an excellent demonstration of a fundamental principal of NLP: How you represent the outside world in your inner world will powerfully affect your subjective experience.

Do some things make you unnecessarily anxious and afraid? How are they depicted in your imagination? Are they too big? Closer than they should be? More vivid in some way? Do they sound louder than they are in real life?  These qualities of our experience, known as submodalities in NLP, can be understood and changed to change the quality of our lives.

In my clients case, changing her representation of that syringe changed the way she felt about it.  It’s a simple enough change to make if you know it’s possible.

Image courtesy of johnnyalive

All behaviour has a positive intention is one of the presuppositions or operating beliefs of NLP. At first blush this sounds a little unlikely. A cursory glance in the newspapers will show a huge range of cruel, stupid and just plain nasty behaviour.

That’s the point while the behaviour may be all those things the intention behind them was positive in some way.

Just think back for a moment, there has probably been a time when you have done something flat out stupid, if you look behind what you did to what you wanted to achieve I imagine you will be able to find something positive in the intention, even if the implementation left a little to be desired.

Of course this presupposition is impossible to prove but it’s a very useful point of view to adopt when dealing with people.

I heard a very nice version of this principle at work whilst listening to a podcast of a studio discussion between two cancer patients; Leroy Sievers, a journalist with terminal cancer, and Elizabeth Edwards amongst other things a US senator’s wife also suffering from cancer.

An audience member asked a question about ’saying the wrong thing’ to cancer patients. He felt he had put his foot in it some years before with a friend who was dying from brain cancer and he still felt guilty about it after all this time.

“How do you handle the situation when a healthy person says something insensitive?”

Elizabeth Edwards answered .

‘I had a 16 year old son who died in 1996 and I had a lot of people say some incredible things to me. And I got some wonderful advice from someone that had lost a brother, and he said:

“People will say the wrong thing but know that they intended to say the right thing“. ‘

‘And I’ve always kept that in mind however stupid the things other people say and believe me that was not the stupidest thing I’ve heard by some considerable distance. I always know that they meant to say the right thing and I think that all of us keep that in mind ‘

‘And there are times when I don’t want to hear it, when I’m on the campaign trail I’ve had people come up to me and want to give me a hug and say “My wife died of the same thing that you died of [sic]” and I don’t know what to say to that’

The presenter then offered this reframe: ‘It’s just a premature condolence’. Which provoked a laugh from her saying “That makes me feel so much better”.