Resources for a friend who just learned he's going to live?

June 2, 2023 8:19 AM

Twelve years ago, my friend was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. Yesterday, he was told that he has been cancer-free for long enough that he no is no longer eligible for cancer-care services. I am wondering if anyone has gone through a similar situation and if you can recommend resources, articles, or ideas that can help shepherd him not this new stage of his life.

My friend underwent an aggressive treatment that involved removal of his spleen & part of his colon and circulating hot chemotherapy in his abdominal cavity. Usually, this form of cancer strikes people in their 70’s and it’s unusual for a patient to live very long after treatment, but my friend was diagnosed in his early 40’s.

The surgery was successful, but healing was lengthy and slow, and he never fully recovered physically or psychologically. His life since then been filled with appointments, testing, depression and the certainty that he would have an early death.

While he understand this is wonderful news, he had grown so used to the life of a cancer patient and the belief that death was around the corner that he’s now unsure how to deal with this new hopefulness. He’s lost something that had become a part of himself and he's feeling ungrounded.

Like myself, he has no supernatural beliefs, so I want to help him find practical approaches. But almost everything I have found online has an element of woo-woo.

posted by PatchesPal to Health & Fitness (5 answers total)

I think the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn or Sylvia Boorstein might be helpful. They both do work in meditation and buddhism but it's not really woo-woo.
posted by dawkins_7 at 8:40 AM on June 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

There was a large wave of people who had this experience when the first effective treatments for HIV were developed. Many people who had prepared for death, both psychologically and logistically, suddenly found themselves back with a long horizon. It was sometimes quite difficult (for example, for people who had given away possessions). I don't have any specific readings to recommend, but searching for writings from that era could be helpful.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 8:55 AM on June 2, 2023 [12 favorites]

I don't have any specific recommendations but transplant recipients might be another similarity to look into. I was on pretty intense medical treatments (dialysis) for four years and had been very much at peace with it and the very real possibility that I wouldn't last long enough to make it to the top of the transplant list. The only things I really had to do for a very, very long time were take care of my dog, stay alive for that particular day, and do my best to be present and accepting about it.

And then I received a transplant unexpectedly, literally only because covid happened and the protocol changed for a sliver of a season. And then I had some more serious complications and now... I'm fine? A bit worse for wear, perhaps, and I'll never go trailrunning or backpacking again, but I'm still here, hanging out on Metafilter with all of you nice folks with my dog snoring under my feet.

And it's freaking odd. Like, you have this weird sense of placelessness, like there's been some sort of administrative error and you're here by mistake. And I feel like a bit of a tourist here now, like I'm looking for work now and I'll pop on over to linkedin, which let's face it was always weird to begin with and now feels nothing short of like it's a product of another planet? I'll look at the expiration date on, like, a can of soup, and it'll be three years away, and it's a date I can actually imagine myself realistically seeing. Mindblowing.

But! Another weird thing happens, too, where after you shake off the hospital gown and take some time to orient yourself into your new reality, you still remember what it was like to accept everything, fear nothing, exist with the bold kind of honesty you had when you were dying and had no reason or energy to do otherwise. And you get to start over, knowing the things you didn't know before you were sick and realizing how fun life can be.

At nearly 48, I'm getting to the age where my friends of the same age are starting to worry about losing their current level of health. An organic-everything old friend was just here to get his father settled into assisted living, and so my friend is now facing the fact that his own health won't last forever. He's always been preternaturally unruffled, but this? This ruffles him.

And I'm finding I'm not afraid in the same way. I've already faced that fact, and dealt with it, and accepted it. Worn it until it had holes in the elbows. And it's kind of the silver lining in all of this. I'm finding it's breathtakingly lovely to grow older without worrying about growing older, if that makes any sense? It makes it easier to try things, learn things, accept things, do things, enjoy things. I smile a lot. Luck seems to land in my lap. It's really, really good.

Anyway, that's where I am, three years post transplant. I think your friend should make some steps, stretch his wings a bit. Try some new things. Make things. Create things. And I'm happy to email if it helps, okay?
posted by mochapickle at 9:37 AM on June 2, 2023 [45 favorites]

It's bonus time. I know a few older folks who thought they were going to die around a certain age. One family member, the oldest of that generation in his family and now in his 80s, saw his older male relatives a generation above all die from natural causes in their late 40s to early 60s. Another distant relative thought she'd die much younger because of her smoking and her mother's relatively early death from natural causes. Both of these folks feel like they are on bonus time, in a good way. They got past the scary part, and now they feel like they have extra, in a good way.
posted by bluedaisy at 11:02 AM on June 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

There’s a documentary about Wilko Johnson, the lead singer of Dr Feelgood, which followed him after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and then as he discovered it was in fact treatable. It’s been a long time since I saw it, but my memory is that he found a strange kind of peace and clarity when he thought he was going to die, and was really quite discombobulated when he discovered he would probably, in fact, live (he did live another 9 years and died aged 75).

It’s available on YouTube, so you could maybe give it a watch before recommending it to your friend, to see if you think it would be useful for him.
posted by penguin pie at 11:23 AM on June 2, 2023 [3 favorites]