The patient may be the one with cancer, but the problem is not hers alone. I always encourage the family to come in and be a part of the patient s treatment. Support for everyone involved is essential, he says. However, the word support means different things to different people. Not everyone has a strong home support system.
Some people live alone, have no living family and few friends.
Others like Amy Chaiklin of Bloomfield find they need time alone to think and heal and work through their emotions. For her, the constant phone calls, gifts and visits made dealing with the several surgeries, and aggressive chemotherapy, she needed to fight ovarian cancer that much harder. I m thankful for all the support I had, because I know it was out of love, says Chaiklin, 36. But at one point, I was surrounded by so many flowers, that I felt like I was at a funeral. What I really needed was to be left alone for a while.