Wendy Harpham on Healthy Survivorship

Kids Cope With Parent's Hair Loss

Parents going through chemo often struggle to explain their alopecia (hair loss) to their young children. The rhyming verse in Nowhere Hair  offers a healing conversation-starter that is both whimsical and profound.

How We Die: Love and Dementia

Writers choose words and phrases with care. In all my years of writing, only once or twice have I repeated a sentence word-for-word in a single essay. So when surgeon Nuland did so in How We Die, I took notice.

How We Die: Discriminate Specialization

In my last post I share my discomfort with a passage from How We Die. Reading on, however, Nuland offers a useful insight about a risk of increasing specialization:

How We Die: The Problem With Specialists

Most pages of my copy of Nuland's How We Die sport underlinings and check marks. On page 72, though, I drew a big question mark in the margin beside a paragraph that preceded another that earned a "great insight!"

How We Die: Natural Law

Dr. Nuland opens Chapter 2 of How We Die saying, "No one dies of old age, or so it would be legislated if actuaries ruled the world."  Later in the chapter he introduces a perspective on aging that can serve Healthy Survivors well.

Elephant in the room

I just read a gem of a book by breast cancer survivor Bob Riter, Executive Director of Cancer Resource Center of the Finger Lakes: Elephant in the Room: Practical Advice When the Diagnosis is Cancer.

Your Medical Mind

My recent posts have discussed some of the difficulties of modern medical decision-making in the context of PSA testing for prostate cancer. A new book by Harvard oncologist Jerome Groopman and Harvard endocrinologist Pamela Hartzband offers help to Healthy Survivors: Your Medical Mind: How to Decide What is Right for You.

Let My Colors Out

Oftentimes, insights and mantras that help adults become Healthy Survivors can help children whose parent is going through treatment, if presented in an age-appropriate way.

A Father's Unrelenting Battle

I just read A Father's Love: One Man's Unrelenting Battle to Bring His Abducted Son Home. Why?

Partly because a good friend of mine is a family lawyer. Anything that gives me insight into her world helps me be a better friend.

Hope Will Find You

Rabbi Naomi Levy's book To Begin Again has been my go-to book when comforting someone after the death of a loved one. Her new book Hope Will Find You is surely to become one of my go-to books when supporting someone after the death of hopes and dreams.

Tolerating Treatment

Your doctor dictates into your chart, "The patient is tolerating treatment well." Huh? After every treatment you feel nauseated, lightheaded, weak, headachy and, in a word, miserable. What does your doctor mean by "tolerating treatment well"?

What Not to Say to a Cancer Patient

The Dallas Morning News ran a story on the front page of today's Health section entitled, What Not to Say to a Cancer Patient.  For the article, special contributor Melissa T. Schultz interviewed me, two other survivors (scroll through photographs) and Dr. Walter Baile of University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center (MDACC).

Inconceivable: Blaming Science

Inconceivable is the story of a couple who became pregnant with the wrong embryo. Early on, we learn that church and religion had played central roles in the lives of Carolyn and Sean Savage. When faced with their health crisis, their church became a source of both support and additional pain.

An Inconceivable Mistake and Healthy Survivorship

To further our discussion of Healthy Survivorship -- what it is and how to achieve it -- let's look at it in the context of a medical challenge that is not an illness or injury.

Henry Kaplan, The Gentle Giant

Henry Kaplan, The Gentle Giant. 

He was the first giant I'd ever seen. My chance meeting occurred on an otherwise uneventful afternoon in radiation oncology at Stanford....

Patients are a Virtue

Mutual understanding helps build strong bonds, including those between clinicians and patients. How can patients learn more about the world of the clinicians who care for them? One way is by reading true stories of clinical encounters.

Healing Walks

An aphorism from the business world may help on the path to Healthy Survivorship: The current system is perfectly designed to deliver the results it does.

So if you don't like the way things are going under the circumstances, change something! Today I am blogging about changing how you walk.

Promise Me -- A Sampling

In my last post, I recommended Promise Me, by Nancy Brinker, with Joni Rogers. One reason is the unusual and effective presentation of Brinker's story.

Promise Me

Regular readers of this blog know if I review a book, I'm going to recommend it. Today's post is no different. Thumbs up for Promise Me by founder and CEO of Susan G. Komen for the Cure Nancy G. Brinker, with best-selling author Joni Rodgers.

Emotions After Cancer

When I was first diagnosed, my medical background made me more prepared than most for the physical and emotional challenges of cancer treatment. What blindsided me were the medical and emotional issues that arose after completion of treatment.

The Problem of Specialists

When in training, I had to rotate through each specialty before I could become board certified in internal medicine. I remember telling my new husband how much I loved learning about (fill in whatever my current rotation).

"So are you thinking of specializing?" he'd ask.

Last Acts

"Imagine you know you have only a few months to live. What would you do with your remaining time?"

Faltering Cancer Trials

Faltering Cancer Trials should get everyone's attention. The NYTimes Opinion piece opens, "The nation's most important system for judging the clinical effectiveness of cancer treatments is approaching 'a state of crisis.'"

Jane Brody Walks the Walk

Jane Brody, the NY Times Personal Health columnist, has been guiding Americans on matters of health since 1965. On occasion she offers readers a glimpse into her personal life, such as the time she described the uncontrolled pain she suffered following her knee replacements. 

This week, Jane Brody shares a deeply personal life event in real time: the dying of her husband of 43 years.

When Doctors Become Patients

The Princeton Alumni Weekly published an essay by Robert Klitzman, M.D., "Double Lives," adapted from his book, When Doctors Become Patients. Naturally, it caught my eye. 

I'm So Sorry

The past two posts share bits and pieces of the story of Dr. Bradford Beck, a cardiologist and CEO of a major hospital who broke his neck last May. Today I want to focus on what he said to his wife, Mary, when she rushed to the scene of the accident and found him lying in the road.

A Gift of Uncertainty

Cancer did not make my life uncertain. Cancer simply exposed the uncertainty of life.

This insight helps me accept the uncertainty of survivorship, but it doesn't help me deal with uncertainty. So here's one that does:

Your Friend's Keeper?

You've survived cancer. Now a friend develops the same type of cancer and is making horrible decisions (in your opinion). She's declining conventional therapies for a treatable cancer or deciding against telling her children she is sick. What's a good friend to do?

Happiness in the Storm of Alzheimer's Disease

You will never hear me call cancer or any other horrible disease a "gift." So how can I talk of happiness when dealing with Alzheimer's Disease (AD)?

Family's Lesson on Healthy Survivorship

The Biorkman family celebrated Christmas last week. November 8th, to be exact. Is their calendar messed up? No, their timing was perfect.

The Toughest Stage

Which is most challenging: The day you are diagnosed with cancer? The day you begin treatment? The days in the middle of treatment? The days after you complete treatment and begin your recovery?

Nursing Homes That Belie the Bad Image

Jane Brody's Personal Health column today discusses a model nursing home in Florida. I want to draw your attention to the second half of the article, which highlights the book, Taking Charge: Good Medical Care for the Elderly and How to Get It.

The Last Gift

In the prelude to Why Faith Matters, Rabbi David Wolpe describes his visit to the bedside of a friend, Isaac, who was dying of cancer. Knowing the Rabbi had been through chemo, too, Isaac asks, "why did it happen to you?"

Spiritual Blogging

Mine is not a religious blog. So why am I writing about Rabbi David Wolpe's book, Why Faith Matters?

Cutting for Stone

If you want to visit an exotic land and be swept up in a world of love, faith, family, power and medicine, let me make a recommendation: Pick up a copy of Abraham Varghese's first novel, Cutting for Stone.

It Is What It Is

A trying time of survivorship is the interval between knowing you might have a problem and learning your exact diagnosis. Why? Because you can't reassure yourself you are okay - or are going to be okay - if doctors are ordering tests for the purpose of finding out if you are okay or are going to be okay.

Hope Begins in the Dark

I expected to blog about Jamie Reno's new book, Hope Begins in the Dark, but only after I'd finished reading it. I am enjoying the short pieces by a wide variety of lymphoma survivors too much to wait. Reno, an acclaimed Newsweek journalist, singer-songwriter and lymphoma survivor believed a book that shared stories of survivors would be inspiring and informative to people just starting out or struggling with their cancer journey.

Randy Pausch, A Model Healthy Survivor

If you haven't seen the video, "The Last Lecture" by Professor Randy Pausch, try to carve out 75 minutes from your schedule to hear what this model Healthy Survivor has to say about life.   

Pitting Science Against Patients' Unscientific Stories

Healthy Survivors get good care. And good care depends on healing doctor-patient relationships. But what happens when your doctors talk only in physicalist scientific terms, and you want (or need) to talk about your illness in terms of spiritual or emotional imbalance? Throughout history patients have told stories about their illnesses in order to deal with existential questions, such as "Why me?"

Faith and Healing

The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine - Anne Harrington - Book Review - New York Times  Yesterday I read this excellent review of a new book about the age-old question of the mind-body connection and its role in healing. Dr. Groopman says the author did a masterful job of retracing the history of the “stories” people use to give meaning to our suffering when we are sick or injured.