Living with the Long-Term Effects of Cancer

This is a very significant and courageous book for health professionals, patients, carers and family members written by a psychologist who was first diagnosed with bilateral breast cancer 15 years ago and is the author of two earlier books on emotional and physical effects of living with cancer. The book questions the assumption that those affected by cancer will simply recover and get back to normal when emotional, psychological and physical side-effects can in fact produce a mismatch between optimistic clinical expectations and real life. The chapters cover the struggle of facing up to long-term effects, the dread of recurrence, effects of cancer on relationships and work, and more detailed interviews with a nurse and three doctors as well as a separate chapter on the experience after treatment with male cancers. The book is clearly structured and written, with excellent summaries aimed at different constituencies. The analysis is incisive and frank: some of the deepest issues arise from an unconscious denial of our mortality when faced with the implications of cancer and, for patients, the dread of recurrence and having to undergo further painful and extended treatment when reserves of strength and resilience have already been sapped. So being disease-free is not the same as being free of disease in an emotional and psychological sense. The messages of this book could not be more important for our understanding of living with cancer, so it should it to widely read and discussed.