While receiving and recovering from cancer treatment, a challenge to my Healthy Survivorship was dealing with fluctuations in how I felt and functioned. At times, I suffered from an unexpected drop in my energy, thinking, or ability to handle stress that created problems for me and/or others. I once abandoned my partly filled cart at the grocery store because, suddenly, I’d felt overcome by fatigue and realized the need to use my last drops of energy to drive home.
Virginia Adams O’Connell is a cancer survivor and sociologist who offers a useful perspective on this challenge in her new book, Remission Quest—A Medical Sociologist Navigates Cancer. In a discussion of the importance of maintaining social roles when possible (page 74), Dr. O’Connell suggests that flexibility is the key. To help minimize negative consequences of the unpredictability of your abilities, she offers two practical guidelines:
Communicate: Find effective ways to notify others of changes in your ability to function
Prepare: Find or arrange practical support to tap into when, without warning, you find yourself with decreased abilities and/or increased needs
In other words,
Recognize the unpredictability of your abilities
Accept the uncertainty
Find language or signals for communicating with others about how much you can do
Prepare for times you’ll benefit from doing less and/or receiving support.
This approach enables you to live life to the fullest under the circumstances—a criteria of Healthy Survivorship.
One of the ways this approach helps is by preventing you from withdrawing from the world out of fear of attempting an activity and unexpectedly needing to stop or needing assistance. When fear drives such withdrawal, you miss out on opportunities that would have brought meaning and joy.
Healthy Survivors find healthy ways to deal with unpredictable fluctuations in abilities.
[I’ll have more to share from Remission Quest in future posts. Stay tuned!]
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