A cancer diagnosis is forever, alas, by which I mean that
once you’ve been told that you have cancer, you are never going to be totally
free of the concern that it may recur.
And nor is your partner.
That’s according to an excellent recent study from the UK
published in the journal, the Lancet Oncology, in which researchers looked at
43 studies including over 50,000 patients who had all been diagnosed with a
range of different cancers.
The good news is that although a diagnosis of cancer
frequently resulted in a bout of depression shortly following the diagnosis,
depression tended to dissipate within 2 years.
In a lot of cases, however, depression was replaced
(displaced?) with significant anxiety, and that increased level of anxiety
lasted a long time for a lot of people, many years in fact because even after
15 or 20 years of being cancer-free, there is always the worry, it seems, that
the cancer can still recur.
There was no particular cancer that was more likely to
produce anxiety than others meaning that even those cancers with a good
prognosis can result in chronic recurring levels of anxiety.
The interesting thing in this study, though, is that often
spouses of cancer patients end up with an even higher level of long-term
anxiety than the cancer patients themselves.
(This study was not geared to measuring anxiety in kids of cancer
patients, but one can only assume that that’s a real problem for a lot of
families, as well).
Not surprisingly, I think, women tend to have a tougher
time with this post-cancer anxiety than men do so that even in the case of
prostate cancers, apparently it was more often the female partner who developed
anxiety later on instead of the prostate cancer patient himself, although that
may be only on the surface, I think, since as most of us will acknowledge, lots
of men are programmed to say they are not worried – even to researchers, maybe
especially to researchers – when they are in fact consumed with anxiety.
Anyway, thee take-away message here is pretty obvious: being
diagnosed with cancer has clear and obvious significant short-term costs.
But even when those costs have been adequately dealt with,
there’s still a crucial legacy of potentially damaging long-term consequences,
and the more vigilant a cancer patient is – and their family members – for such
problems, and the sooner those problems are acknowledged, the better the
overall long-term prognosis because cancer is never just a physical problem.
