Keeping a Diary
Aug 31st 2007PostmasterDiagnosis
I strongly encourage you to start a treatment diary as soon as you are diagnosed. It’s a good idea to start the diary with your personal medical history such as previous surgeries, medications you are currently taking, any previous or current illness, and so on. Follow this by detailing the times and dates of the many tests and procedures that inevitably accompany a cancer diagnosis. It’s also very important to document any disease symptoms and treatment related side-effects so you can discuss them with your physician and other caregivers and don’t forget to include important contact numbers and so on. If you keep this up-to-date (which may be hard with everything that is going on), it will become an extremely valuable companion for you. Bring it to all of your clinic appointments and don’t be afraid to ask for a copy of your test results so that you can append them to your diary. The website of the the Abramson Cancer Center has a great resource guide called OncoPilot that has list of questions as well as some handy forms to keep track of contacts, visits, etc. Check it out.
Did you keep a diary? Do you still keep it up to date? Did it help? Did you share it with anyone? Do you look back on it often?
Let’s talk.
Posted by Andrew
2 Comments »
Postmaster on 06 Oct 2007 at 8:28 pm #
Dr. Robert Buckman has an excellent book that helps put a newly diagnosed cancer into some perspective for the patient and their loved ones. It contains some useful information on cancers generally but, more importantly, it tells you what to expect in those first scary days. You can pick the book up at bookstores or from this site: http://cancerword.com.
Doug
Ruth on 06 Oct 2007 at 9:03 pm #
Keeping a diary is very important. I did a great deal of searching for information on the internet and elsewhere and this search usually left me with lots of questions. I jotted them down in a small booklet that I took to every doctor’s appointment. I even had the book beside my bed, ready to write down those questions that inevitably leave your head as the doctor walks into the examining room.
The other way it helped was that writing down information about my cancer and its treatment meant that it was handy just in case I had to go to emergency, which happened a couple of times during treatment. All the information was there for the docs.