When You Have Cancer And Can't Sleep

By Anna Medaris Miller for U.S. News Traci Gordon never had a problem falling asleep or staying asleep. In fact, she has a sleep disorder that causes her to sleep too much. “I could sleep through a whole weekend,” Gordon says. That all changed when Gordon, a 47-year-old administrative assistant in New York, began chemotherapy for breast cancer about seven years ago. The treatment threw her body into an artificial state of menopause, which caused unrelenting night sweats. “My memory of it was waking up five, six, seven times a night, absolutely dripping,” Gordon says. Each time, she would change her clothes, stand in front of the air conditioner and wonder how much of her fatigue was caused by the cancer, how much was caused by the treatment and how much was caused by her inability to sleep through the night. “It was really having an impact on top of everything else,” she says. Sleep problems during cancer are ubiquitous, affecting up to 80 percent of people undergoing chemotherapy, says Oxana Palesh​, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University Medical Center who develops and tests sleep interventions for cancer patients and survivors. One of her studies found that insomnia is about three times more prevalent among cancer patients being treated with chemotherapy than it is in the general population.​ When you have cancer, Palesh says, "it's much more common to have sleep problems than not." ​ Bu...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news