After the treatment finishes then what? (Dr Peter Harvey)
11 Regaining trust in your body - Managing the fears
A fairly common experience when people become frightened by unusual and unexpected changes in their body is that they wonder whether it’s a sign of the cancer returning. As we have seen, this is not an unusual or an illogical thought to have - it makes sense. This can become a problem when your thoughts change from wondering to expecting.
Let’s look at this in some more detail. You notice an ache or pain. Before your diagnosis, you might have thought briefly about it, perhaps decided to ignore it, perhaps found an explanation but dealt with it without very much additional thought.
This all changes after your diagnosis because the possibility now exists that this might be a sign of something more sinister which cannot be just brushed aside. This much is quite understandable and no-one can tell you that your worry is silly or unrealistic.
The danger comes when your thoughts immediately turn into ‘This is the cancer coming back’. A fear has changed from a possibility to a certainty, from ‘might’ to ‘will’. If this is happening to you, then there are a few simple steps that might be helpful to reign in your fearful thoughts.
- First, you must not tell yourself that you are being silly! It is true that an ache or pain might be a sign of the cancer coming back so to worry about it is not worrying over nothing.
- Second, focus on the word might. If you can accept that word rather than the word will, then there is an opposite thought to contemplate ‘the cancer might not have come back’. For every might there is a might not. This is very important, but it is risky. You may feel that you are somehow tempting fate - if you believe that it is not cancer then it will turn out to be malignant.
- Third, and most difficult, is getting a sense of probability - might and might not are expressions of chance and balance. Is it more or less likely that this is the cancer returning? The aim is get a sense of balance that you can live with without your fears dominating and overwhelming you. You can do this in a number of ways. You can ask yourself if you have had a pain/symptom like this before you were diagnosed. If so, try to remember what it was caused by and what you did to manage it. You may also need to remind yourself that many symtoms have more everyday causes than cancer - a headache, for example, can be due to dehydration, lack of sleep, tension, that extra glass of wimne last night. It can be helpful to think of other causes before including the possibility of the cancer's return.
In going through a process like this you may well find that you feel in a bit more control of your fears - those fears may still be there but they may feel less overwhelming. This process is simply taking your fears seriously by acknowledging their basis in reality, but then dealing with them in a direct way.
The Cancer Counselling Trust has now closed.
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