Do You Trust Your Body After Cancer?

If you've survived cancer, do you trust your body to keep you healthy? An ovarian cancer survivor recently told me "I love and trust my body. That doesn't change when I need to give it extra love." Her willingness to trust is particularly remarkable since she has a BRCA-1 mutation, which creates extra vulnerability to various cancers. But in a piece I read this week, written by a two-time cancer survivor, her emphatic answer to this question was "no." "There's no reason," she said, "to think it can't happen again." She struggles with fear, which she admits is a poor motivator to adopt healthy lifestyle practices. The struggle to trust a body that's had cancer may in part reflect a medical system whose idea of prevention is "come back in 6 months for your next scan." Survivorship becomes a series of suspenseful intervals between tests, waiting to find out if the big C is back. With a system so focused on disease recurrence, is it any wonder studies show up to 90% of survivors struggling with fear? It's hard to trust your body when that trust hinges on test results you feel are beyond your control. Like a true friend, your body never means to fail you. What's the alternative? Think about someone who helped you learn to trust yourself. Chances are it was someone who believed in you deeply, and knew that your positive qualities easily outweighed your flaws. You can begin to recapture trust by remembering that your body has more positive qualities than flaws. It's desig...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news