Jane Biehl Ph.D.

After we have been diagnosed with cancer, our lives will never be the same again. But we need to try to just perform one little service – a phone call, a card, an email to encourage others. The wonderful thing is with or without cancer, we may just live a little bit longer with joy!

Wistfully, I recall the days I could work all day, come home and do things around the house and then go out for dinner! Those days are long gone. I am off the chemo this week, but next week I will feel even more fatigue when I go back on.

It takes a village to support someone through a cancer diagnosis.

Chemotherapy treatment can greatly affect balance. But, there are things that can help.

A lunch out with friends may be more therapeutic than you think.

Sometimes life throws you the curveball of cancer.

Nothing is worse than the long-term effects like chemo fog and going deaf. I do think that we need to report these medications and hope research will try to develop treatments with fewer side effects.

Can cancer actually lift an individual out of the "rabbit hole" of despair?

What you do matters, even in the waiting room of the oncologist's office.

Robert Louis Stevenson's poem, "My Shadow" reminds this cancer survivor about her diagnosis.

I laughed after I put my soiled laundry in the wastepaper bin in my bathroom instead of the laundry hamper. When I told my oncologist, she didn’t think it was funny at all.

While getting old and being ill can both cause a person to slow down, they are not the same thing.

I usually got the infections first, so my oncologist loaded me up with antibiotics and off I went. She knows that not going would cause such a depression that I would be worse.

After being diagnosed, my first inclination was to to go to my bedroom, put my head under the covers and ignore the world. Fiends kept calling me and I ignored the calls. Finally, I answered the telephone in frustration.

I know my life will never be the same again. I will not ever be well or free of chemo and treatments and shots and blood counts and bone marrow biopsies. I have slowly become used to my new way of life.

Planting a tree can be a wonderful and lasting way to honor a survivor or a loved one who has passed.

Sometimes the days may be cloudy when we hurt from the chemo and side effects, but there is enough light to keep dancing.

Many people seem programmed to think negatively, but we need to change that.

In our lives before cancer, we have several avenues for our energy including family, work, school, volunteer work and on and on. We were able to juggle it all. But after a diagnosis, we need to choose one or two passions and let the rest go.

It may take some time, but finding the right oncologist can be like striking gold.

People may tell me that I look good, but I don't always feel that way.

Patients with cancer are often asked when they’ll be done with chemotherapy or treatment. Those of us with blood cancers and bone marrow type of cancers such as aplastic anemia, myelodysplastic syndrome, lymphoma and leukemia, along with a host of other cancers sadly have to say, “never.”

Often, it is the nurses who hold the hands of the patient who is extremely ill in critical care or dying. It is the nurses left to comfort the grieving families after the devastating loss of a loved one.

Many patients with cancer know of the importance of stepping back and enjoying the little things in life.

It dawned on me that even when I am going though horrible chemo, I feel better when I can be outside in the summer. I enjoy sitting in a lawn chair out in front and chatting with the neighbors.

By cancer standards, 104 months is a long time, but for me, it flew by. As my oncologist has said about all of her patients, it is never long enough. I always want to write more, do more, travel more and live life more.

Sometimes going through cancer makes a person want to scream, and sometimes, it should be OK if they do.

We stumble, we fall, we hear the cancer may have returned, we wait for tests to come back and we have rough times along the way. We need to learn to walk, whether we are limping or not.

Americans have a lot to learn. We need to embrace the importance of not always talking, but of touching. I have been so lucky.

No phase of life is totally good or bad. There is always rain.