Colon & Rectal Cancer: A Comprehensive Guide for Patients & Families - Softcover

Johnston, Lorraine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1565926331 ISBN 13: 9781565926332

Publisher: Patient Centered Guides, 1999

Synopsis

The fourth most common cancer, colon and rectal cancer is diagnosed in 130,000 new cases in the U.S. each year. As with many other cancers, the treatment environment is evolving. As a patient (or the family researcher) you need up-to-date and in-depth information to participate wisely in treatment decisions.Colon & Rectal Cancer: A Comprehensive Guide for Patients & Families includes:

• Characteristics of colon cancer, staging, suspected causes, and factors in prognoses
• Current treatment options
• Clinical trials and promising future treatments
• Coping with medical tests, symptoms, and treatments
• Recognizing and minimizing the impact of treatment on sexual function, libido, and fertility
• Caring for and adjusting to an ostomy, whether temporary or permanent
• Emotional responses to diagnosis, treatment, remission, and all other aspects of dealing with the condition. Stories from those living with colon cancer are included.

Author Lorraine Johnston, with her background in life sciences, emphasizes using knowledge to dispel fear. Those who read this book will encounter medical facts simply explained, advice to ease their daily life, and tools to be a strong advocate for themselves or a family member.

About this title

About the Author

Lorraine Johnston is the wife of an eight-year lymphoma survivor and the daughter of a twenty-year lymphoma survivor. In the years since her husband's diagnosis, she's been involved in a number of support groups that offer emotional and practical support to lymphoma survivors. Her first book is Non-Hodgkin's Lymphomas: Making Sense of Diagnosis, Treatment & Options. In the course of her support group efforts, Lorraine has been interviewed by the Philadelphia Inquirer and by National Public Radio's Marketplace program regarding the best ways to find reliable medical information using a personal computer and various media such as the World Wide Web. She attempts to dispel the myths that access to sound medical information is cloaked in secrecy and that medical literature is impossible to interpret. Using her life-long love of biology and her degree in life sciences, she helps cancer survivors evaluate accurately the material they locate, emphasizing resources such as the National Cancer Institute's databases of treatments and clinical trials, and the National Library of Medicine's MEDLINE, a collection of over nine million published medical research studies. Lorraine's years of study have included many courses in psychology, but she found that nothing in her educational background prepared her adequately for facing the terror and heartbreak of cancer. One of her chief interests is helping the newly diagnosed as well as long-term survivors feel less lonely and less afraid as they confront their diagnoses and weigh their options.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Preface

In the face of fear, you've chosen to educate yourself about colorectal cancer and its treatments--a courageous and positive approach to moving past a dreadful event. This book will help you do so.

By enabling you to build a frame of reference from sound, current medical information, we'll help you understand the decision-making process needed to make appropriate choices about your medical care.

There's a great deal of promising information we can share with you about colorectal cancer, ranging through information about evaluating and choosing treatments; ways to locate and track new treatments being developed; preparatory information about tests and procedures; survivor experiences with keeping or losing friends; perspectives on handling employers, insurance companies, and the Social Security Administration; and so on. Did you know, for example, that you can find information about the dosage, mode of action, and side effects of medications being recommended for your treatment? That charitable groups exist expressly to fly you and your family, free of charge, to a distant cancer center where you might plan to be treated? And that if you're being treated away from home, the American Cancer Society's Hope Lodge network can provide you and your loved ones with rooms free of charge?

Sources of information

The chief resources used in developing this book were the journals and texts of Western medicine, which are summarized and presented to you in language understandable by those without a medical background. Appendix A, Resources, discusses references that can be accessed using a computer and the Internet, such as the National Cancer Institute's grand-daddy of all cancer information databases, and Medline, the National Library of Medicine's database of more than 9 million published medical research papers.

This book cannot substitute for up-to-date oncology training and good medical care. You should always consult with specialists in colorectal cancer before making decisions about your care.

Several chapters that are of interest to all cancer survivors, such as the chapters on stress, traveling for care, and clinical trials, were reused from my first book about lymphoma with appropriate changes made for colorectal cancer survivors.

Many colorectal cancer survivors generously volunteered to tell of their experiences with diagnosis, surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, employment, and financial issues, and the emotional flotsam that might accompany any of these. Their words are included throughout the text, and serve as an anchor to reality and an inspiration for the rest of us.

Who should read this book?

If you were diagnosed recently, this book can help you understand what tests and treatments you'll encounter in the following months. We also discuss the emotional aspects of each experience: the shock and isolation of diagnosis and the reactions that follow, the fear of upcoming treatments, and the anxiety associated with waiting to see if treatment is successful.

If you are a long-term survivor of colorectal cancer, we provide the information you need to make sense of the possible long-term physical and emotional consequences of disease and treatment that you may be experiencing, such as dealing with an ostomy or with continued fatigue, as well as the information that some of you may need concerning recurrence of disease and its treatment.

If you're a caretaker of someone with colorectal cancer, the collective and pragmatic wisdom in this guide will enable you to make the most of your caretaking and advocacy efforts. It will assist you in relaxing and staying healthy so that you can best care for your loved one, both emotionally and instrumentally. We can help you understand and respond appropriately to the reactions of your loved one and yourself to the unique stressors that a cancer diagnosis entails.

Who should not read this book?

If you have not yet obtained a firm diagnosis of colorectal cancer, please do not read this guide until your doctors have clarified your circumstances. Symptoms that mimic colorectal cancer such as rectal bleeding are attributable to several other disorders. You should seek appropriate treatment for these conditions from a qualified physician.

If you have other cancers such as intestinal lymphoma, carcinoid tumors, sarcoma, anal cancers such as basal, squamous, or epidermoid carcinoma, anorectal melanoma, or malignancies of the gastrointestinal tract other than colorectal cancer, this book contains information that is not correct for your circumstances.

If you need detailed information about screening for colorectal cancer, see the American Cancer Society's 1999 book Colorectal Cancer: A Thorough and Compassionate Resource for Patients and Their Families. We have included a page in the back of this book that summarizes screening information. You might wish to photocopy and share this page with family and friends.

How to read this book

We've organized this book carefully to make the best use of what might be the prioritized time and energy of colorectal cancer survivors and those who look after them. The format of this book follows the path of your experience with colorectal cancer: symptoms, testing and diagnosis, surgery and hospitalization, treatment, long-term effects, and so on. We try to provide you with digestible amounts of information that you'll need at each stage of awareness and treatment. In fact, you might do well to consider reading only the chapters that are meaningful to you at a given point in order to avoid information overload. We believe that this method of organization will enable you to locate the information you need most in a timely manner.

A chapter is devoted to stress and its sometimes surprising effects on the immune system. We offer a variety of ways to cope with stress, and insights into making challenging experiences work in your favor. Moreover, in appropriate chapters, we discuss the impact of stress at that stage, and its possible effect on your well-being.

A glossary of medical terms related to colorectal cancer is included. Many general resources are provided in the appendixes.

Edition details

• Publisher: Patient Centered Guides
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1565926331
• ISBN 13: 9781565926332
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 528