Sure, cancer specialists are busy, as Mark T. Hegel , the clinical psychologist who headed the Dartmouth study, put it. " They have short visits. They are very focused on treating the cancer. They are not well trained to look at the psychological issues."
But we're talking major life-altering event here. And while there are books, groups, and therapists galore to help with the long haul -- clarifying the diagnosis, bearing up under treatment, then living the rest of your life as best you can -- there's much less to help with the first days and weeks after your life has been turned upside down.
Unfortunately, I'm speaking from personal experience. My husband's two cancer diagnoses over the past 11 years were devastating to both of us. Dealing with everything that came later, including his death last summer, has also been difficult, to put it mildly. But for sheer, soul-shattering shock, the first hearing of the bad news was in a class by itself.
I learned -- the only way, the hard way -- how to muddle through the early days of a terrible diagnosis. Eat. Sleep, with sleeping pills if necessary. Breathe. Talk to a few close people. Don't, as I did, tell everybody every single medical bulletin -- you'll spend all day and evening on the phone. Triage your life: Cancel what you can, but not the fun things -- in my case, exercise and singing.
Do cruise the Internet for information about the disease if that helps control your anxiety, but log off immediately if it upsets you too much. You have doctors. You don't have to become the molecular biologist or brain surgeon who will fix everything. Despite my decades as a medical journalist, I found that truly understanding a complex diagnosis is a daunting intellectual and emotional task.
A life-altering diagnosis, in other words, moves you abruptly from a normal existence into a parallel universe of fear and disease, though illness, of course, is part of life, too.
