AFTER CANCER: IF CANCER CELLS ARE SO POWERFUL THAT THEY CAN CAUSE LIFE-THREATENING DISEASE, HOW CAN I EVER RELAX KNOWING THAT THERE MIGHT BE CANCER CELLS IN ME?

With time and practice, you can learn to lessen worries about left over cancer cells. Some techniques that will help include

•learning to view cancer cells as the weak, abnormal cells that they are

•learning to regard your body as possessing powerful defenses against cancer cells (this is hard to do soon after cancer treatment: after all, your body allowed the cancer to grow in the first place, and it is weak from treatments)

• focusing on efforts to keep your body healthy and strong •concentrating on increasing your capacity for acceptance and hope, and decreasing your need for control and perfection

•learning to accept that this is an uncertainty with which you will have to live

We have learned from people who live long lives with certain types of incurable cancer that the threat to their health and life came less from their persistent cancer than from normal age-related changes and illnesses. Even though they had known cancer, their cancer had little effect on their life or longevity unless they let the knowledge of their cancer affect them emotionally in a negative way.

Remind yourself of the patient who was successfully treated for cancer and spent the next forty years physically healthy but worried sick about a possible recurrence. At the age of ninety-eight the patient said, “I guess 1 really was in remission all these years. I spoiled what could have been forty wonderful years worrying about something that never happened.”

Do not lose today by worrying about something you can never know (whether or not you have any leftover cancer cells) or about something that may never happen (recurrence).

*23/32/5*