What is a Healthy Survivor?
SURVIVOR: From the time of discovery and for the balance of life, an individual diagnosed with cancer is a survivor.
National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship (1986)
HEALTHY SURVIVOR: A survivor who gets good care and lives as fully as possible is a Healthy Survivor.
Wendy S. Harpham, MD (1992)
A survivor is a living person who has ever received a medical diagnosis. You are a survivor whether you're receiving optimal therapy from highly qualified physicians or sipping snake oil bought online from charlatans…whether you're reveling with gratitude for each day or paralyzed by uncontrolled pain or fear of recurrence.
What kind of survivor do you want to be?
After my diagnosis, the irrepressible physician in me nudged the writer in me to find a medically appropriate adjective to clarify what kind of survivor I was striving to be. One word popped out: healthy. The beauty of this two-criteria term is that you can be a Healthy Survivor no matter what your condition or prognosis. The key is that you are making life the best it can be.
How do you become a Healthy Survivor?
While there is no single right way to become a Healthy Survivor, there are best ways for each patient. Each of you has to forge and follow your own unique path to Healthy Survivorship—one that takes into account your strengths and weaknesses as well as the challenges you are facing, the losses you have suffered and the uncertainty of life after your illness or injury.
My personal approach has been three-fold: (1) obtain sound knowledge, (2) nourish healing hope, and (3) take effective action. This approach has helped me land on the positive side of unfavorable statistics, find meaning in my illness, and experience some happiness in tough times. [see A Healthy Survivor]
There is life after illness or injury.
Make it a good life.
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What is healing hope?
To answer, let’s first define hope. Hope is a feeling linked to a belief that the desired outcome can happen for you. Hope plays a major role in survivorship, because it affects how you feel and what you do. Like a potent medicine, hope can help or harm, depending on what you are hoping for.
Healthy Survivors reflect on their hopes and learn to invest in specific hopes that help them get good care and live as fully as possible. Healing hope motivates you to take action when there is something you can do to increase the chance of the desired outcome. Healing hope helps you wait when you can't do anything to affect the outcome.