How to respond to others that pull away after the cancer diagnosis.
PUBLISHED June 25, 2019
Jamie Aten, Ph.D. is a disaster psychologist who doesn’t just study disasters—he’s lived mass and personal disasters—as a Hurricane Katrina survivor and early-age onset stage IV colorectal cancer survivor (almost 5 years NED). He is Founder and Executive Director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute and Blanchard Chair of Humanitarian & Disaster Leadership at Wheaton College. His most recent book is A Walking Disaster: What Surviving Hurricane Katrina and Cancer Taught Me About Faith and Resilience. In 2016 he received the FEMA Community Preparedness Champion Award at the White House. Follow on Twitter @drjamieaten or visit jamieaten.com.
This past week I had the opportunity to visit the National Cancer Institute Emergency Management & Physical Security Branch. As a cancer and Hurricane Katrina survivor, it was very meaningful to have the opportunity to connect and learn from this great team of professionals.One of the things I took away from our meeting was a quote they shared from Maryland Emergency Management Agency Director Russell Strickland: “Mitigation is the center of the universe!” Simply put, mitigation is what we do when we take steps to lessen the impact of negative events.
I am grateful that I had a strong support system that came to my aid after I received my diagnosis of cancer. However, I was surprised by several close friends and family members that seemed to fall away after I made my diagnosis public. Some of the people I needed the most were suddenly nowhere to be found. I felt saddened, hurt, and struggled not to feel forgotten at times. And even though this was a small minority of just a few people, it threatened to make the fallout of my cancer disaster worse.
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