NSHD: Nodular sclerosing Hodgkin's disease, a lymphoma.

Next there's the physical fatigue of treatment. I spent three nights in the hospital after my surgery, and that was the time I experienced fatigue that's beyond fatigue, a fatigue so palpable it seems you could touch it. I wanted to shrivel into the fetal curl of a woolly-bear caterpillar, spin a cocoon of sleep and tell my doctors to wake me when it was time to leave. I learned that sleep is bliss, that sleep heals, that sleep is the essential post-op drug.

I also dozed off where I least expected to. During radiation, I sometimes napped inside the TomoTherapy machine, lulled in my lassitude by Pink Floyd and Metallica. It was the radiation, which lasted more than seven weeks, that resulted in the most profound fatigue.

-- Dana Jennings

Posted by at 11:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

and many other cancer survivors, money is tight and going back to work a financial necessity. But one of the first big analyses to examine employment rates among American and European cancer survivors has found that they are at significantly higher risk for joblessness than healthy counterparts.

The report, appearing Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, is an analysis of previously published studies. After accounting for variations in data among those studies, it concluded that cancer survivors in the United States and Europe were 37 percent more likely to be unemployed than healthy peers. In the United States, where it is particularly critical for survivors to hold on to jobs, because they provide health insurance, cancer patients may be at even greater risk of unemployment than patients in Europe, the study suggested.

Continue reading "Unemployment after Cancer" »

Posted by at 3:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)