After the Diagnosis: You Have Choices

Michael Lerner, PhD

When you are diagnosed with cancer, five areas of choice open before you. Fully understanding your choices – and where each may lead you – can change your life for the better.

These five areas involve:

• Choices in healing

• Choices in conventional therapies

• Choices in complementary or alternative therapies

• Choices in dealing with pain, suffering, and grief

• Choices in facing death and dying

Intentionally or not, in the course of a lifetime, we all make choices in these five areas. The paths we take, based on these choices, are life-changing. Unfortunately, most people never step back to fully consider the implications of their choices, the importance of choosing wisely, and how their choices affect themselves and those they care about.

Choices abound at each stage in the development of cancer:

• at diagnosis

• in conventional therapies

• in complementary therapies

• in living with the hope that you have been cured

• in facing recurrence, if that should happen

• in choosing new treatment to respond to recurrence

• in living in remission, with hope that the remission is long-lasting

• in experiencing progression of the cancer

• in living with the hope that the cancer will progress as slowly as possible, or that new treatments will be developed in your lifetime, or that some alternative therapy might extend your life

• in facing the prospect of dying.

When you are diagnosed with cancer – even if your chances of recovery are very high – you will likely consider the worst-case scenario. In doing so, you are psychically coming to terms with death and dying, even though the actual probability may be very low. This puts you in a state of grieving – for the loss of your well-being and the sudden uncertainties about your future.

The Great Book of Healing

You might regard each of your choices -- in healing, in conventional therapies, in complementary therapies, in pain and suffering, and in death and dying – as major sections in a great book. In my view, this great book exists partially within us and partially outside of us. The chapters within us -- which are unique to each of us -- contain the wisdom necessary to make sound choices in healing. The chapters outside us include the latest scientific studies of mainstream cancer treatments. In addition, they include available science and clinical experience on complementary cancer therapies. They also include the wisest teachings of all religious, spiritual, psychological, and philosophical traditions about how best to live life.

Because each of these five areas of choice is, in fact, a major section in a great inner/outer book, you do not have to read all of these sections – or their many chapters -- all at once. It is simply useful to know that they are there, for you to turn to when you are ready. They contain a wealth of wisdom that can transform the experience of cancer. Consciously and skillfully making choices in healing may help you to maximize your chances for achieving a cure -- or for extending your life as long as possible.

Michael Lerner is president and co-founder of Commonweal, a health and environmental research institute in Bolinas, Calif. He is also president and co-founder of the Smith Farm Center for the Healing Arts in Washington, D.C. He is co-founder of the Commonweal and Smith Farm Cancer Help Programs, which offer week-long residential retreats for people with cancer.