Live Strong: Inspirational Stories From Cancer Survivors-From Diagnosis To Treatment And Beyond

Lance Armstrong Foundation

ISBN 10: 0739322710 ISBN 13: 9780739322710

Casa editrice: Random House, 2005

Riassunto

Survivors from all walks of life talk about what “living strong” in the face of cancer means to them.

Since the now ubiquitous LIVESTRONG™ wristbands became available in May 2004, the Lance Armstrong Foundation has raised more than $50 million for cancer survivorship programs, and the signature phrase has become a battle cry for those who fight the disease every day.

Now, the Lance Armstrong Foundation has compiled, from hours of videotaped interviews, poignant and dramatic personal accounts from cancer survivors. Covering a wide range of subjects, from grief to spousal relationships, employment discrimination to coping with medical bills, infertility to fear of recurrence, survivors share their experiences and speak candidly about how cancer has impacted their lives. For twenty-four-year-old Amy it’s how her illness changed her relationship with her parents. Mike, a male survivor of breast cancer, talks about gender stereotypes and genetic testing. And Eric, the father of a five-year-old survivor of a brain tumor, recalls how friends and strangers helped his family with financial issues and how the experience brought him and his wife closer together.

While heartbreaking at times, these powerfully honest stories are ultimately uplifting and extremely reassuring to patients and their families. They offer the wisdom and hope that only survivors can give. LiveStrong is a remarkable testament to the resilience of the human spirit.

From the introduction by Lance Armstrong:
My work with the LAF shows me daily that sharing our stories and learning from one another’s experiences helps us cancer survivors continue to survive. Some people think the cancer experience is only about the diagnosis and treatment of cancer, as if after the disease goes into remission, it no longer exists. But survivorship goes beyond remission. Survivorship is an evolution.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

The Lance Armstrong Foundation (LAF) believes that in the battle against cancer, unity is strength, knowledge is power, and attitude is everything. From the moment of diagnosis the LAF provides the practical information and tools that people with cancer need to live strong. The LAF was founded in 1997 by cancer survivor and cycling champion Lance Armstrong. The LAF IS a 501(c) (3) located in Austin, Texas.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

"I am somebody with cancer and I am somebody without cancer."
SAMANTHA EISENSTEIN
I became a survivor when I was diagnosed with Ewing's sarcoma in December of 1999.

I went down to New York for treatment and started in January of 2000. Treatment went through September of 2000 with seven rounds of high-dose chemo and surgery. The tumor was in my leg, in the tibia. I spent about four months at home afterward, September through December, recovering with physical therapy. I was a senior in college when I was diagnosed and only had one semester left. I went back to school in January of 2001 and was always tired, always bruising, and always catching everything that was going around. Because of the high-dose chemo that I got, I kept going in for tests, but the doctors just kept saying, "Your bone marrow is tired. It'll start working. It's just working slowly." Finally, I went in for a bone-marrow biopsy in April of 2001 and they found the secondary myelodysplastic syndrome, which is one of the precursors to leukemia. I said to them, "If there is anything I can be doing from now until May when I graduate, I'll do it, but otherwise, leave me alone. I want to go back to school." I knew that the search for a bone-marrow donor could be long and drawn out. They said that was fine. So I went back and graduated from college in May of 2001. I started chemo again in June or July to get the disease back into remission, because it had started to progress. I was home for a couple of weeks and they found a perfect donor match for me. All they told me was that he was young and male. I found out later he's from St. Louis, but I haven't met him yet. I underwent the bone-marrow transplant in August of 2001, was in the hospital for three months, spent the nine months afterward going in for tests and medications and anti-rejection and anti-everything drugs, and finally in June of 2002, they said, "Okay. You're set. Go do your thing." So I went up to graduate school at Middlebury College for the summer and moved to Boston in September of 2002. I started working for a public-health-education nonprofit where we do mostly HIV-prevention research, and interventions and violence prevention.

Then last year I went to the I'm Too Young for This symposium that was held at MIT. It was the first time I even found out that there were other young-adult survivors, because in a hospital like the one I was treated in, sadly, nobody ever really left. All of my friends had passed away. I didn't have any people that I went through treatment with who made it long enough to go through the survivorship journey with me. Since I finished, I had been struggling with my appearance and scars, all the issues that are not the day-to-day chemo stuff and therefore didn't feel legitimate. But I went to that conference and saw that there was a whole community of people like me out there. The keynote speaker talked about how he gets approached by so many survivors who say, "I need to quit my job. I don't know what I want to do, but this is where I want to be." And I realized that's exactly how I felt. So my friend Bridget and I started talking about organizing a benefit concert for young-adult survivors to help them transition out of treatment and into the "real world." We started doing research and found that there aren't any organizations designed to provide educational scholarships, professional training, and advice on rent, loans, car payments, grocery and residual medical bills for young-adult survivors. But instead of being discouraged and giving up completely, we gave up the idea of the benefit concert and just decided to go full steam ahead and create our own organization. It's called Surviving and Moving Forward. It's called the SAM Fund for young adult survivors of cancer. I feel uncomfortable saying, "I'm Sam, and this is the SAM Fund," because though it did start obviously from my own story and experiences, the acronym comes from Surviving and Moving Forward. We want to help people who are no longer receiving treatment and feel abandoned. When I was going through treatment, all the doctors and nurses were focused on getting me to the day when they would tell me that I didn't have to come back anymore. Obviously, that's a huge and important day, but then I felt that people sort of forgot about me. Being a young adult who had to go out and fend for myself, and decide either to go back to school or not, or to get a job and start paying rent, was incredibly overwhelming. It's just hard. It's hard for anybody right out of college. But then you add $20,000 in medical bills to it and it makes it even harder. And so what we decided to do was create an organization just to provide financial assistance in that transitional time.

So that's what I've been doing for the last nine months. It's been the best thing in my own cancer journey because it's given me a way to reclaim control over the whole thing, to have cancer in my life because I chose to put it there, not the other way around. It's been really empowering and really exciting. I've met some amazing people. We've already started partnering with other organizations. We've done some fund-raising. We're working on a whole bunch of stuff. I'm actually about to go part-time at my day job, so that I can run the fund two days a week. I hope to make it full-time eventually. It's been interesting to see how all of the pieces are now coming into place. I have this incredible energy and excitement to get this fund off the ground and hand out the first check to a survivor who needs it. For that, I am very grateful. I just decided I'm going to start an MBA program for people involved with organizations or who want to be involved with organizations with a good social mission. Cancer isn't who I am, but it is where I've been. It's a part of who I am. And to now be able to incorporate that into a career and into a positive presence in my life makes me feel grateful.
I'm monitored long-term by an endocrinologist. When I saw him for the first time, his nurses sat with me, listed all of the drugs I had been on--many I had forgotten about--and said, "Here's the risk of this disease. Here's the risk of this recurrence. You're at elevated risk for this. There's a good chance you're going to get this." I could have heart problems, kidney problems, liver problems, thyroid problems. Basically anything in my body can be affected long-term by the chemo, especially because I had five drugs in very high doses the first time around. On top of that, I had three or four drugs in very high doses the second time, plus all the radiation from the X-rays. I never had standard radiation, but all the X-rays and the CAT scans add risks to everything. I told them that I just wanted to know what I should look for, what I can do to prevent it, what to do if I notice any of the warning signs. Other than that, I wanted to be left alone. I don't want to hear it every year. I don't want to hear what my risks are, because if there's nothing I can do about them anyway, then I don't want to live in fear of them.

I have a multitude of scars from all the biopsies and the catheter in my chest. The biggest scar runs from just above my knee to my ankle. That's the worst part for me physically. I'm lucky in that I can pretty much still do what I want, though I can't do anything high-impact. I can't run. I can't do anything that's going to stress that bone. The scar is not a typical scar because they had to do a skin graft. I'm very aware of it, and how different my skin looks there. To me it's a reminder. On some days, it's a positive reminder of where I've been and where I am, how hard I've worked to just be able to walk. But on other days, it's a reminder of the fact that I had cancer, which is still a really hard thing to process sometimes. It's a reminder that I have limitations that I didn't have before. And that's been really hard. But other than that, I've gotten used to telling the difference between what the doctors say I can't do and what they say I shouldn't do. There are some things that they say I probably wouldn't ever be able to do again and it's just my nature to go and prove them wrong.

I hope my orthopedic surgeon doesn't see this because he'd kill me if he knew I was saying this. But anyway, when I was coming out of surgery, he sat me down and went through this big long list of things that I might not be able to do again. Among those things he told me that I couldn't do were running and playing tennis. At first I got really upset about it and then I remembered that I hate to run, so it was really no great loss. But when he said that I couldn't play tennis, I got so upset. It's the one sport that I love and have always played. And when the doctor left, this fellow in the room, who was just wonderful, said, "You can't play competitively but you can still play. Just let it bounce twice before your return. It'll be fine." I know I can't run, because it'll break the bone. But I played tennis last summer with my mom, and I let the ball bounce twice. I didn't run after anything, but, you know, even though I wouldn't be able to play competitively again, it was fine just to play that little bit. Just being on the court and having a tennis racket in my hand after hearing his voice say, "You'll never be able to do it again," felt awesome.
One of the hardest things about moving back to Boston and starting work was that people didn't know me. They asked me all the standard questions: Where was I from? What did I do before I moved here? And I didn't want to just announce that I had come from a bone-marrow transplant and that I hadn't done anything before this job because I wasn't able to work. I didn't want cancer to be the first thing that people knew about me. So I made stuff up. I was very self-conscious about it, because I had gone through a lot of physical therapy and still walked with a little bit of a limp. My hair was still very, very short. I felt like the cancer identified me before I was able to identify myself, ...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Random House
• Data di pubblicazione: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0739322710
• ISBN 13: 9780739322710
• Rilegatura: Audio CD