Finding Support
Reviewed by Poonam Sachdev on February 19, 2022
Video Transcript
R. Garrett Key: When people go
through the experience of having
cancer, there's an isolating
tendency there.
You need your friends
and your family
or whoever the most
important people are
in your life.
When you feel afraid
and you feel sad
and you feel lonely,
and all you want to do
is to turn inward,
those are the more important
times to turn outward
and to reach out for help.
And if you're not sure what you
need, to just share
your feelings.
When you recognize a need or you think you could use a little bit of help, then I would go ahead and ask for a little bit of help. The alternative is to wait until you're starting to get exhausted and things are becoming difficult that you're not able to manage. Think of things that you can ask that are specific. Something that I've had a lot of patients tell me is helpful is that they will come up with lists of what they need and the things that they need to do, and they'll assign it to the people in their life they care about. And it's helpful to them because they can concretely get stuff done.
I guess the central theme of all of it is that it's really important to not be alone. Communicate, ask for the help you need, and when you feel lost, let someone know you feel lost. And on the other hand, for the family or the friends who don't know what they can do, ask people what they need, to bring over meals, to make phone calls, to drop in for no reason. It's important to give people their space and their privacy, but also to just be around and to be available.
I think one of the core things of feeling alive and being a complete person is that you have to have intact relationships and the whole world can kind of transform around you. And in the midst of all that, the interruption of life that can come with all the demands of treatment, I think the advice I give is about sort of maintaining or restoring connection as a way to make a cancer experience kind of survivable, that you can go through something really difficult and still feel intact. It can help you have meaningful days all the way until the end of your life.
When you recognize a need or you think you could use a little bit of help, then I would go ahead and ask for a little bit of help. The alternative is to wait until you're starting to get exhausted and things are becoming difficult that you're not able to manage. Think of things that you can ask that are specific. Something that I've had a lot of patients tell me is helpful is that they will come up with lists of what they need and the things that they need to do, and they'll assign it to the people in their life they care about. And it's helpful to them because they can concretely get stuff done.
I guess the central theme of all of it is that it's really important to not be alone. Communicate, ask for the help you need, and when you feel lost, let someone know you feel lost. And on the other hand, for the family or the friends who don't know what they can do, ask people what they need, to bring over meals, to make phone calls, to drop in for no reason. It's important to give people their space and their privacy, but also to just be around and to be available.
I think one of the core things of feeling alive and being a complete person is that you have to have intact relationships and the whole world can kind of transform around you. And in the midst of all that, the interruption of life that can come with all the demands of treatment, I think the advice I give is about sort of maintaining or restoring connection as a way to make a cancer experience kind of survivable, that you can go through something really difficult and still feel intact. It can help you have meaningful days all the way until the end of your life.