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    My Quick Guide Through Breast Cancer: Diagnosis, Surgery, Chemo & Radiation
    My Quick Guide Through Breast Cancer: Diagnosis, Surgery, Chemo & Radiation
    My Quick Guide Through Breast Cancer: Diagnosis, Surgery, Chemo & Radiation
    Ebook154 pages1 hour

    My Quick Guide Through Breast Cancer: Diagnosis, Surgery, Chemo & Radiation

    By Dr. Paulette Kouffman Sherman

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    About this ebook

    Getting breast cancer marks a huge shift in how you are living. It often comes at the most inconvenient time and can temporarily put fear and disorganization on the forefront of your life, emotions and thinking. The first step is to take a deep breath and ground yourself. This book can help with that.

    Dr. Sherman, a psychologist and breast cancer survivor wrote this to help you absorb your diagnosis, assess your treatment situation and get through your surgery, chemotherapy and radiation in the best possible way. She gives you tips, warns about possible pitfalls and shares her personal experience, every step of the way.

    My Quick Guide to Breast Cancer will:

    • Help you prepare your medications and calendar for treatment
    • Check your insurance coverage for your hospital and surgery
    • Make your “No Can Do Lists” for chemotherapy and radiation
    • Reach out to relevant cancer organizations.
    • Figure out your "Healing Team" and contact numbers.
    • Make a Mind/Body/Spirit healing plan.
    • Understand your blood counts, chemotherapy cocktail and doctor notes.
    • Explore getting a wig, a short haircut, hair loss and henna crowns.
    • Create a work plan that's manageable during your treatment.
    • Make a list of chemo buddies.
    • Find a few good cancer role models and sounding boards.
    • Explore getting the BRCHA test & the Neulasta shot.
    • Explore the role of your diet with a cancer diagnosis.

    And much more!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateApr 11, 2013
    ISBN9780988890541
    My Quick Guide Through Breast Cancer: Diagnosis, Surgery, Chemo & Radiation

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      Book preview

      My Quick Guide Through Breast Cancer - Dr. Paulette Kouffman Sherman

      Author

      Introduction

      Going through breast cancer was one of the hardest years of my life. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, yet I have found that a lot of growth came from it.

      I love to write, so I wrote about my experience and came through it with a book that was more than 300 pages. It was part memoir, part self-help, and a photographic account of how I got through. It was my lifeline and I hoped that in sharing it, it would help other women walk this path too.

      I thought it unlikely that women struggling with cancer would want to read such a lengthy book, so one day while I was walking the beach I had a revelation that it was meant to be a 4-book series called The Cancer Path, which could embrace women at different points along their journey.

      The book in your hands is Book 1–The Quick Essential Guide to Breast Cancer: Diagnosis, Surgery, Chemo & Radiation. I wanted it to be a slim guide that you could slip into your purse and flip through for easy tips and reference. Even if you don’t have cancer, this could be that first cancer gift book that could connect you to someone else who had this experience. And if you are facing your own cancer diagnosis, this book provides an overview and some practical tips about how to get through surgery, chemo, or radiation. Some women might prefer just to read these tips, get through conventional treatment, put cancer behind them, and stop there.

      Book 2–The Cancer Path: A Spiritual Journey Through Healing, Wholeness & Love approaches cancer on a level deeper, as a spiritual initiation. It allows you to heal cancer from the inside-out by giving you tools to address healing your mind, body, emotions, and Spirit as you go through your traditional treatment. If you are like me, you may not want to be a passive recipient of healing. You may want to take action and create a year of treatment that leads to greater wholeness and health on all levels. I read over 60 books so that I could address these four levels of healing for you, as well as explore many discrepant issues such as diet, how your immune system affects cancer, whether emotions, thoughts and stress affect cancer, and so forth. This book is for the cancer patient who wants to do serious inner work and learn spiritual lessons along this path so she will be changed as a spiritual initiate.

      Book 3–My Date With Cancer: 21 Spiritual Lessons is a gift book that explores 21 spiritual lessons from Book 2, without the more intensive research, explanation, and exercises. It has pictures and brief spiritual lessons that a cancer patient can flip through while in the hospital. It’s intended to provide love and hope, and point out some spiritual lessons that will help patients grow and be positive while on their cancer path.

      Book 4–Create Your Own Cancer Path Workbook is a workbook to help cancer patients keep track of their personal experience and story. It is a journal/workbook with ideas, springboards and exercises so that they can remember how they got through chemotherapy, what and who inspired them, the lessons they learned, and other personal notes. In the end, they can use this workbook as a template for writing and publishing their own story, if they wish. This can be a legacy for their children, grandchildren, and great-grand children to learn from their story. I found writing to be very therapeutic. Research shows that there are many benefits to cancer patients from journaling and leaving a legacy behind.

      Although I am a psychologist, life coach, and healer by profession, I wrote these books as a patient and cancer sister too. I hope that the wisdom, tips, and love I received can be passed on to you, to bring you healing and light on your journey.

      Paulette

      Getting Diagnosed, Preparation & Things to Know

      Diagnosis

      It was the day before my 41st birthday and I sat in my oncologist’s office at Sloan Kettering in NYC. The doctor had just given me the news: I had triple negative stage 2a breast cancer.

      Right now you have a 50% chance of it recurring, my doctor said, but if you do the whole chemotherapy and radiation treatment for 8 months then there’s only a 25% chance of recurrence.

      Twenty-five percent? I thought. Maybe I shouldn’t do all this then.

      She continued, We need to be really aggressive, because if a cell spreads to a different area then it’ll be incurable. That’s why we want to get it all now.

      The word incurable bobbed in my head.

      My next thought was that I barely had time in my life as it was, without cancer. I have two kids under 4 years old (one who has a severe genetic disorder), I work full time, have a 90 minute commute, and am trying to write a book! I have no time for cancer. No thanks, I’ll pass!

      But of course that wasn’t an option. No, I was on this journey whether I liked it or not, so all I could do was accept it and adjust. I could adjust my attitude, schedule and priorities, and focus on healing.

      Also, the triple-negative breast cancer diagnosis worried me. This triple negative diagnosis was only given to about 20% of women with breast cancer. It was especially aggressive and they still did not know a lot about it. According to Patricia Prijatel in Surviving Triple Negative Cancer, in hormone-negative cancers, cells cannot communicate successfully because of a lack of receptors. So triple negative cancer cells cannot get the message from certain drugs that hormone-positive cancer does respond well to like Tamoxifen and Arimidex. Chemotherapy is actually more effective for triple-negative breast cancer than for hormone positive breast cancer though. For more information about triple-negative cancer you can go to www.tncfoundation.org.

      And let me start out with sharing some good news that I read: 85-90% of women diagnosed with breast cancer survive at least ten years after treatment. This is a good statistic to remind yourself.

      My guess is that your diagnosis might have hit you out of nowhere too, it may feel scary and it probably came at the most inconvenient time. And really, there’s no convenient—or welcome—time for such news.

      Yes, it sucks. It’s unfair. You don’t deserve it and you didn’t cause it.

      But take a breath, my sister. You can adjust. Many women have walked this path before you and you can too. You’re not alone.

      The doctors will tell you one thing. Books will tell you another. But ultimately you will learn to trust your own voice on this path through life and death. You will find strength you never knew you had.

      And if my experience or tips helps to ease your way, I will be grateful.

      Your Treatment Choice

      If we really want to live, we’d better start at once to try; If we don’t, it doesn’t matter, but we’d better start to die.

      —W.H. Auden

      As a recently diagnosed cancer patient, you may find yourself in a tailspin. Perhaps you are unsure at your diagnosis crossroads how you should proceed with treatment. You may want to consider alternative treatment instead of the conventional route. This is entirely your decision and I am only writing this book as a patient who considered taking the alternative route but opted for standardized treatment and doing my own mind/body/spirit healing treatments in tandem. I am writing this as a breast cancer patient, not as a doctor or scientist who has the answer.

      I tried not to read too much on the Internet after my diagnosis, but after a quick Google search I found that Breast Cancer is the number two killer of women and the 2nd most common cancer. It has been busy killing 400,000 women annually. One woman a minute gets breast cancer and every 13 minutes a woman dies from it. More than 12 million women had breast cancer in 2012 and an expected 20 million are projected to have breast cancer in 2020. Clearly I was not going through this alone, even if I

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