Education

"I'm sorry to tell you, but you have cancer."

If you have heard those words, you know the feeling of that knife cutting into the very soul of your being. The questions that race in your head, your heart sinking in your chest, and the thought "Now what do I do?"

What you do now is get ready for battle. You learn as much as possible about YOUR cancer, and what it has done and will TRY to do to you. Without the proper knowledge of what the demon inside of you is doing and how it lives, how are you supposed to kill it?

I personally feel that educating yourself on your disease is the best way to combat it. As a survivor myself, I took this task very seriously and learned everything I could about my type of cancer, the survival rates for the different stages, and what the standard of care was at the time. I feel that if I had not done this, if I had not been a sponge, things might have turned out differently for me.

I would say, don't accept everything that the doctors tell you.  Yes they are very knowledgeable, but do they know everything, no.  It doesn't hurt to do more research on your own, find out questions to ask that may determine the future of your care.  You never know, you may find something that even your doctor didn't know about, a clinical trial, a complimentary treatment, who knows until you look for yourself.

The Lance Armstrong Foundation has a wonderful website that can provide you with countless tools from emotional concerns to treatment options and clinical trials.

There are other websites to visit as well, like Stand Up To Cancer, the American Cancer Society, and the National Cancer Institute