Deciding on a cancer treatment plan could be the most important decision a survivor makes.
PUBLISHED January 31, 2018
Khevin Barnes is a Male Breast Cancer survivor, magician and speaker. He is currently writing, composing and producing a comedy stage musical about Male Breast Cancer Awareness. He travels wherever he is invited to speak to (and do a little magic for) men and women about breast cancer. www.BreastCancerSpeaker.com www.MaleBreastCancerSurvivor.com
Our decisions to select a particular regimen for our health and healing after a cancer diagnosis can be one of the most difficult choices we're ever faced with. Killing cancer cells is a precision process with no guarantee of positive results, and the road to NED (no evidence of disease) is riddled with pot holes in the form of possible negative side effects. But the final outcome can certainly be positive.
It's the unknown nature of the procedures that make our choices a little scary and extremely important. These choices we make, either by ourselves or with the counsel from our oncologists and surgeons and, I'm sorry to say, the sometimes overly ambitious advice from our neighbor or the hairdresser we've been seeing for years, are highly personal. Yet it's surprising how many people we meet who have opinions and ideas about our cancer decisions, even those well-meaning folks who have never known cancer personally.
I recently had a cancer survivor who had undergone months of chemotherapy suggest to me that because I was diagnosed with stage1, grade 3 breast cancer without lymph node involvement that my disease was one of the "easy" ones, and that it would be a simple matter for me to skip any chemotherapy.....
It's the unknown nature of the procedures that make our choices a little scary and extremely important. These choices we make, either by ourselves or with the counsel from our oncologists and surgeons and, I'm sorry to say, the sometimes overly ambitious advice from our neighbor or the hairdresser we've been seeing for years, are highly personal. Yet it's surprising how many people we meet who have opinions and ideas about our cancer decisions, even those well-meaning folks who have never known cancer personally.
I recently had a cancer survivor who had undergone months of chemotherapy suggest to me that because I was diagnosed with stage1, grade 3 breast cancer without lymph node involvement that my disease was one of the "easy" ones, and that it would be a simple matter for me to skip any chemotherapy.....
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