Challenges Facing Cancer Survivors

EP: 1.Seeing Cancer as a Chronic Illness

EP: 2.Holistically Defining Cancer Survivorship

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EP: 3.Challenges Facing Cancer Survivors

Cancer survivors often face a unique set of challenges that can impact their physical, emotional, and social well-being. Some of the most common challenges include physical like fatigue or pain, emotional, social, and financial.

These challenges can vary significantly from patient to patient, and not all survivors will experience all of them. Additionally, the support and resources available to cancer survivors can vary widely depending on location and individual circumstances.

Here, Amy Selly, CNP, AOCNP, Allina Health medical oncology advanced practice provider lead, discusses the varying challenges facing cancer patients and survivors.

Transcription:

0:05 | Everything is really dependent, not only on their cancer diagnosis, their stage of diagnosis, what their treatment has been throughout, whether it be surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, immunotherapy, you know, potentially stem cell transplants, whatever that may be. It may be a combination of any of those. So, depending upon where those treatments lie in kind of increases what those risks are for certain long-term physical side effects, things that can happen within the long term. So some of these treatments will have the risk of having long-term heart issues or long-term neuropathy or long-term cognitive changes. So those are some of the physical, more common physical things that we see. Sort of that long-term neuropathy, fatigue that goes with many of these diagnoses, although the majority of patients over time, many of these long-term side effects do decrease, and they return back to sort of more of a precancer diagnosis normal.

1:16 | But then there's not only those physical impacts, but the emotional impact that goes with it, and sometimes that can be a longer-term challenge for patients as well. So just having been through that cancer diagnosis and those fears of recurrence and fears that go in with every provider visit that happened with it. So those, and then financially. For many patients, the financial impact is felt long term, I think, particularly when we're looking at cancer as a chronic illness. Many of these medicines that help our patients live longer come with, you know, pretty significant financial toxicity, and if you add that, maybe loss of work, and being a primary provider for a family, those are going to significantly impact patients long term.