Читать книгу The Cancer Directory - Dr. Daniel Rosy - Страница 48

As well as needing immediate help to cope with your reaction to diagnosis, it is likely that you are going to need longer-term help both to support you through your treatment and to support you through your recovery programme. An effective strategy can be to form a support group of friends around you. This involves actively recruiting a group of friends that you can call on if the going gets tough. The need for this will depend on the seriousness of your situation and your own emotional state. But it is a mistake to assume that, because you have a close partner or family, you have a support network.

Those closest to you will be going through their own reactions and, quite often, distress ricochets around families like a ball in a pinball machine. You may feel you are able to offload your feelings, but find, later on in the day or week, that they come bouncing back to you in the form of a marital row or a sick child. It is therefore good to form a group of six to eight friends who are ‘signed up’ members of your personal support group who can pledge to be there for you in times of need. You may wish to have your support group meet once a month at your home to hear about what you are up to and what your needs will be in the forthcoming month. This will help them as well as you.

At first, this might feel like an embarrassing thing to do – to concentrate so much focus and attention on yourself. However, you are giving people an opportunity to express their care and love, and it is likely that they will find this very rewarding. You will also find that being clear and articulating your needs gets easier as time goes by. In so doing, you will be providing a tremendously healthy model for your friends and family to follow in their own lives. It doesn’t all have to be a one-way street either. You may choose to structure the support group so that everyone in it has a chance to express their feelings and ask for the support they need from the group each month. You will probably find this empowering as, although there may be some areas in which you are very vulnerable and needy, there will be others in which you are strong and able to give good-quality support to others.