Shannen De-Stresses
- Actress Shannen Doherty, 49, is battling metastatic breast cancer.
- Cancer treatment can be stressful and emotionally taxing; leaning on friends and loved ones as a way to alleviate stress can be helpful to the cancer journey.
- Managing stress is an effective way to improve your immune system, which can help your body fight cancer.
Leaning on Friends During Cancer
Friends can be an enormous source of support to those battling cancer. They can also help you to de-stress and focus on things other than the illness you are living with.
Beverly Reeves, an ovarian cancer survivor, found support in many places: Faith, friends, and family. The Texan tells SurvivorNet: “You see those plaques that say faith, family, and friends. That was true for me. And those three really helped support me as I went through the diagnosis and the treatment.”
“And so, you know, while not everybody is around supporting you on a regular basis, we still need that support, because we’re still going through it,” says Reeves. “We just may not look like we looked when we were going through chemo. We have our hair back, we may have a little bit more energy, but we’re still going through.”
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“If I had one piece of advice for someone who had just been diagnosed with ovarian cancer,” says Reeves, “it would be to get a strong support group together. Get your close friends. If you’re connected to a faith community, get your faith community. Get your family. Let them know what’s going on and let them help you.”
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Being open, vocal, and self-advocating during cancer treatment with your community as well as your doctors can enhance your experience by widening your support circle. Having a strong support network, as Reeves said, can really help the cancer journey.
'Faith, Family, and Friends' Helped Beverly Reeves Get Through Ovarian Cancer Treatment
Manging Stress Amid Treatment
Finding fun moments with friends and loved ones is a great way to lessen the stress that often accompanies cancer treatment.
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Dr. Heather Yeo, a colorectal surgeon and surgical oncologist at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian, tells SurvivorNet that managing stress effectively can help patients while undergoing treatment for cancer.
“There is no doubt that stress and your immune system affect your body and affect your body’s chance of healing,” she says. “Many patients are very anxious and worried that they cause their own cancer through stress or anxiety. I always tell patients: ‘You can’t look in the past and you certainly can’t blame yourself.'”
Dr. Yeo points to the immune system as one of the main reasons to work on effective stress management. “There are certain people that are the most relaxed people on earth and end up developing cancers. So I don’t think that there’s a clear direct correlation between stress and cancer. That being said, stress certainly decreases your immune system and it may decrease your body’s ability to fight certain cancers.”
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“In addition, we know there have been several studies that have looked at healing and recovery after cancer surgery or have looked at recurrence, and we know that when your immune system is down when there’s an excess of stress hormones going on, your body has a hard time recovering and cancer takes advantage of that,” says Dr. Yeo.
These are the primary reasons to follow Doherty’s lead, and seek to minimize your stress by enjoying fun, light moments with friends blue balls, or otherwise.
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