After the treatment finishes then what? (Dr Peter Harvey)
05 Beginning to recover & Recouperation
It is important to emphasise that recovery is a process, not an event. It’s not something that just happens - it takes place a bit at a time - and often takes much longer than you expected and almost always takes much longer than you had hoped.
Once your treatment has finished there is often a sense of pressure to be as you were before all this happened. One of the key messages of this guidance is to point out that this cannot happen immediately - and, as we shall see - may not happen in the way that you might have expected.
Before you can begin the main part of your recovery you need to ensure that your energy and strength (both physical and emotional) are in place for the tasks ahead. For this you need to do two things - recuperate and convalesce.
Recuperation
It is a widely held belief, often correct, that the treatment of an illness is meant to make you feel better.
One of the many paradoxes of cancer is that, more often than not, the treatment makes you feel worse. This is not surprising - you are cut and possibly mutilated, injected with poisonous and powerful chemicals, subject to dangerous rays all in the name of treatment.
The aggressiveness and power of the treatments are a necessary response to the power of the disease but this very power takes its toll in other ways.
These interventions place enormous physical strains on the body. There is often little time to recover from one treatment before the next one starts.
The treatments themselves may make it difficult for you to sleep and eat properly - two critical parts of the body's defence and recovery system. Some of the treatments drain your energy and resources to such an extent that it’s as much as you can do to put on the kettle. Add to this the emotional turmoil - dealing with the impact and implications of the diagnosis, the uncertainty, the upheaval, the additional burden that you feel that you are imposing on family and friends, the loss of so many aspects of your routine.
Emotional stress can be as energy consuming as any physical activity. You also need to remember that your time in hospital may have been quite short - these stays have been reduced over the years as anaesthetics and procedures have improved - but this does not mean that the operation you have experienced was minor or that your recovery should mirror the brevity of the hospital stay.
Surgical procedures may have shortened, but our bodies haven’t yet caught up! They still need time to recover. After all that, is it any wonder that you feel wrung out and exhausted, without resources or reserves?
For quite understandable reasons people want to get back to doing the things they used to before the diagnosis but find themselves falling at the first hurdle because they simply find the whole thing too much.
However smoothly your treatment has progressed and however well you have tolerated the various indignities to which you are subjected, some time simply to recharge and recover - to recuperate - is absolutely essential. This is the necessary foundation on which to build recovery. There is no one right way or length of time to do this. It may be a few days or a few weeks - how long will depend on your state of health before your diagnosis, your age, the intensity, frequency and length of your treatment and so on.
Recuperating is the very first step in a process of rebuilding.Take however long you feel you need. And, most importantly, give yourself permission to take this time.
The Cancer Counselling Trust has now closed.
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