Conclusion

It may seem strange to finish a book such as this with some conclusions. However, the book started with some key aims:

• 1. Most important to me is that you have gained accurate information. This is not easy in our current times with masses of internet information available, much of which is highly dubious.

• 2. When you are told that you have cancer, you (along with everybody else) will have a thought that “I’m going to die very soon.” This is virtually never the case – the vast majority of people are in cusps A and B, i.e., “cured” or “living with cancer,” NOT preterminal (cusp C), or dying (cusp D) (see 4-cusp picture in Chapter 3).

• 3. All of you will experience grief/bereavement after the diagnosis, although most of you will live for long periods of time after this and the majority will be cured. The landscape of grief may prove to be a useful model for you (see landscape picture on page 116).

• 4. You can see the different strands of orthodox and complementary medicines and how in each of these spheres some things will be right for you and others not, but you, in conjunction with your doctors, nurses, and therapists will find what is right for you in the knowledge that you know what is available.

• 5. If you are of a religious/spiritual frame of mind you persevere with this, expand it, and if you are not, you either go down the route of psychological intervention (either by the orthodox route of clinical psychology or the complementary route, e.g., hypnotherapy), or if this is not your way, try practical approaches. The three patients who wrote pieces typify, by pure chance on my part, these different approaches (see Venn diagram on page 119).

• 6. The diagnosis of cancer changes your life and that of your family and close friends for ever, but to quote Maggie Keswick Jencks again “above all, what matters is not to lose the joy of living in the fear of dying.”