Make a decision about Cancer
Organize Support Group
Get a Comprehensive Medical Report and a second opinion
Educate yourself about Cancer
Understand the Bigger Picture
Take your Time to make a decision
Consult Experts on Cancer
Organize your Doctors
Select the Best Medical Option
Use Healthy Strategies
Consider Herbs and Acupuncture
Pain Control
Healing

For what ever kind of cancer that you may have, any doctor would agree that the best approach is to deal with this step-by-step.

Your life is for you to decide. Just like what I have mentioned above. Cancer is like being in the wild jungle. It would be your choice if you would entirely delegate your survival to your guide and follow everything that he would say and do. Or you may actively involve your self, learning as much about the cancer and creating a partnership in the decisions that has to be made.

Each one deals with cancer differently. If you get cancer and decided to join a support group, use herbs or take long walks along the beach, it is your choice. But for people you care about get cancer, they need to make their own decisions. You can offer suggestions, but if they choose a different path, it is usually best to support them.

Being diagnosed with cancer is emotionally devastating. To a certain extent this also affects your family and friends. The emotional stress can be best handled with support coming from those you care and love. Talk about your condition, discuss with them about the things that you want to do and if they can help in anyway, ask for them.

Beyond the support from those you know, joining a support group can provide tremendous comfort and might even extend your survival. According to studies made, women suffering from breast cancer that joined support groups tend to live twice as long as to those who didn’t. It has been theorized that support groups help people cope with the stress of having a life-threatening illness.

Upon suspicion of cancer, the tumor or part of it will be recommended by your doctor to be taken out. This is called biopsy. The suspect tissue that is removed shall be examined under the microscope by a pathologist. If the cells are cancerous, the pathologist writes a report that specifies which type of tumor you have. Other details will also be determined such as the stage of cancer, how aggressive it is and how fast it grows.

The pathological report is very important because this will be the basis of all future treatments that will be involved. That is why it is important that the pathological report should be correct and concise and will make you clearly understand what it says. Your doctor will help you understand what it means.

It is also best to request a second opinion. It doesn’t imply that you mistrust the pathologist’s report, but rather, you need to be sure that the report is correct.

Know more about your condition so that you may be able to decide more intelligently together with your doctor about your condition. There are a lot of sources that you may refer to. You may call your local Cancer Society or in the U.S., There is a program of the National Cancer Institute, the Cancer Information service where information on different kind of cancer is given free. You may also check on the internet.

You may already have gathered much information about your cancer and you may want to know the statistics of survival. Understand that statistics may provide the “big picture”. But general statistics may be a little bit misleading, because it is a report of averaging the survival rate of all diagnosed at varying stages, from early stage to advanced stage. It is obvious that those diagnosed at latter or advanced stage has a lesser survival rate. But nonetheless, this may give you a concrete basis for hope of survival.