New Book Spotlights Cancer in Early Adulthood

A new book aims to educated young adult patients with cancer about the modern reality of life with their disease.

“Coping With Cancer in Early Adulthood: From Diagnosis to Treatment to Day-to-Day Life Changes,” which is now available from Adams Media, is designed to offer information, support and strategies for patients who are 18 to 49 years old.

CURE sat down for an interview with the book’s co-author, Cristina Pozo-Kaderman, a pyscho-oncologist who holds a PhD in clinical psychology. She is a senior psychologist, director of Interprofessional Education and director of the Young Adult Program (YAP) in the Department of Supportive Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute with a faculty appointment at Harvard Medical School in Boston. She co-wrote the book with Saul Wisnia, senior publications editor-writer at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Transcript

What do you hope are the big takeways from the book for young adults with cancer?

While getting diagnosed as a young adult in this stage in life is challenging and it is difficult, and in no way do I want to minimize that, I would also say that there are strategies that you can use to help guide yourself through this difficult time, to make things slightly better at different points in your cancer trajectory. And I think that what the book highlights are those specific areas that are unique challenges for young adults — for example, the whole idea of autonomy; this is a stage in life when, if you're at the younger end of this developmental stage, you're trying to become autonomous from your parents, and then you may regress because of life circumstances when you get diagnosed, or if you're at the upper range of this, instead of having to maybe move in with your parents, they have to move in with you, because you have needs.

So I'm really hoping that the book highlights those areas that are unique in this stage. How do you deal with feeling so isolated from your peers? And how do you manage that? Because as a young adult, those people around you don't really understand what you're going through. They have an intellectual understanding, if they've sat in a philosophy class and talked about life and death, or they've read some literature about it, but that true emotional understanding isn't there because, thankfully, they haven't had to face their own mortality, whereas, when you're older, you have, because you've known people that have died.

So another key takeaway, I hope, is to help young adults reading this book to understand they're not alone. And there's a great resource section about how to connect with other young adults that can really provide a peer support for you.

Sexual health concerns are pretty major at all stages of life, but definitely at this stage, so the book addresses that. Fertility concerns are addressed in the book. So, I don't know that there's one takeaway, but there's lots of different key areas that are really important during this developmental stage in life, and that's what the book highlights and focuses on.

Transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

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