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A comprehensive, compassionate look at the specific challenges and approaches targeted to assist patients with early-onset cancer (diagnosed in one who is eighteen to forty-nine years old).
As unbelievably challenging as a cancer diagnosis at any age is, the author, a clinical psychologist who has focused her practice exclusively on young adults with cancer, is clear that the rarity of this occurrence (only four percent of all cancers fall into this category) cannot help but propel the disease to even more potentially debilitating levels.
With less research available, young adults with cancer experience uniquely difficult issues including, amongst others: the largely unknown impact of longer-lived time periods following intensive medical treatment; social and emotional isolation; financial worries; parental issues involving young children; relationship challenges; career beginnings; educational setbacks; hormonal and mental health issues; developmental and identity issues.
With both candor and compassion, the author lays out suggestions, tools and approaches to help manage these problems, and more, all relayed in a warm and practical tone which cannot help but provide comfort and validation to any reader managing life under these circumstances.
It’s hard, the author acknowledges, to be so young and critically, perhaps terminally, ill.
It’s tragic, to be facing intense treatment, not once but perhaps many times, battling a disease with an uncertain outcome that may, if one is very lucky, be resolved, and not reoccur at all. Alternatively, one’s lot may be cast to require chronic mind-and-body battering treatment that reoccurs over decades. Which is still preferable to any other possible outcome.
The author’s acknowledgement and counseling here to those affected by all of these topics (even the most difficult ones) is critically needed and long overdue.
This is a book that belongs in the library of any patient, caregiver, family or friend touched by this topic.
A great big thank you to #Netgalley, the author and the publisher for an ARC of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.
