Why is it important for cancer patients to prepare for the worst and hope for the best? It’s all about having options.
When you consider the possibility that cancer may take a greater hold on your life, you acknowledge that you need to get your ducks in a row. You’re pulling your head out of the sand and admitting that you have cancer. This means you have the chance to plan your strategies.
Planning anything when you have cancer is a process. You are looking at where you go from here. What do you want your life to be, given the confines of cancer?
It’s really about options. Cancer may have dug in and planted itself in your life, but you don’t need to surrender all control to the disease. Knowing what your choices are means learning how to manage your cancer through different stages.
Some people are able to survive their cancer for decades, because they understand it’s about managing the disease. They look at where they are, where they will be during cancer treatment, and where they want to be when cancer treatment ends.
Sometimes people are afraid to consider the possibility that cancer will become too great a foe. But it can actually be very helpful to know what those options are, should your life come to that point in time.
When you organize your life to accommodate the needs that arise from your cancer, you’re not giving in to the disease. You’re taking charge of how it affects you. You’re choosing how you want to live with cancer. Do you want quality of life or quantity of life? This is a personal decision that each cancer patient must make for himself or herself. If you want quality of life, you want to be as comfortable as possible, and often that means that you choose to stop debilitating treatments when cancer has spread. If you want quantity of life, you are willing to do whatever it takes to live every day you can live, even if it means you endure difficult cancer treatments.
By actually making a conscious decision about what you want and how you want it to be, you are choosing the life you want to live with cancer. In order to do that, you need to recognize where you are in cancer treatment, what your options are, and what the likely outcome will be. And you need to know that if you decide that quality of life is more important than quantity of life, palliative care specialists can help you stay as comfortable and active as possible, so that you can enjoy the life you have.
This isn’t about dying with cancer. It’s about living with it. It’s your life. Enjoy it. Embrace it. But above all, choose it. Don’t let life just happen to you. Make life work for you.