Coping

Suleika Jaouad, the young leukemia patient who writes the column "Life, Interrupted" for the New York Times, has written a bunch of great pieces lately. The one from last Thursday especially struck me .

Jaouad is very wise, especially for someone in her early 20's. I don't know if adversity brings that kind of wisdom, or if she's just an old soul. Whatever the case, she has a very nice perspective on her disease and her life.

This column is fairly straightforward -- one of many out there (as she herself notes) that gives advice on dealing with cancer. It's called "Six Ways to Cope with Cancer." And, as promised, she offers six ways of coping.

You can read the column for yourself, but I want to comment on a couple of her suggestions:

"Find Your Community." A friend of mine who moved to another state told me she had a hard time "finding her tribe." I liked that phrase -- it signals a deep connection between yourself and the people you interact with. Important for all of us, but especially for cancer patients. I think it's vital to be able to talk with someone who knows exactly what you've been going through, and who can offer some advice for getting to the other side. I was lucky enough to find my own tribe pretty soon after I was diagnosed, an online support group that I still belong to, and that has been a source of information, support, and inspiration for almost five years. Jaouad says she has found a community online, too, through Facebook and other sources, but she still values face-to-face interaction most of all. So be it. For me, with my kids' busy lives (which I wouldn't give up for anything), the idea of driving downtown at night to get to a support group was just too stressful. Being online works. The point is, find your tribe. Don't do it alone.

"Be Kind to Yourself." She describes some of the physically difficult days she has, side effects of her treatment. So some days she sleeps into the afternoon. Some days she has "chemo brain," and is forgetful. She tends to beat herself up for these things, seeing them as signs of failure. We all need to give ourselves permission to be cancer patients, to have bad days, to remember that things aren't what they used to be (and to hold out hope that maybe someday they will be that way again). It's OK to have a bad day, physically and emotionally. (And it's also nice to have a community that can pick you up a little when it happens.)

Finally, "Set Goals Unrelated to Cancer." I think, for me, this was the most important, and the hardest to get to. Naturally, when cancer hits, it makes us focus on little else but the disease. For someone as young as Jaouad, that was probably especially devastating -- a whole lifetime of dreams planned out, and put on hold. But it's not just the 22-year-olds that have those feelings. They are there whether we're 40 or 70. And it's not just big life plans we hold off on, either. It can be day-to-day things. We can't even plan a week ahead, wondering if the way we feel that day will get in the way, or if a sudden need for a treatment will spoil everything. As I said, it took me a while to get past those feelings. Eventually, I thought, " If I say No to this little thing, and then to the next little thing, when will it end? I'll eventually talk myself into not getting out of bed in the morning. If I plan something, and I can't do it, the world isn't going to stop without me. The work will get done anyway. The movie or the festival or the baseball game -- they'll all happen whether I'm there or not. So why not move on with life -- until I can't?"

A wise young lady, that Jaouad. As she said, lots of people give advice to cancer patients. And the advice that she gives really isn't all that original. But it's nice to have a reminder every now and then.