Stand By Her » Chemo & Radiation

Be with just the Happy people

Stand By Her — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 18:06:28 +0000

People who spend time with happy people are more likely to become happy themselves. That’s according to a July 2010 study that examined how emotions spread contagiously.

David Rand: The more friends you have that are content with their lives, the more likely you are to become content. And the more friends you have that are discontent, the more likely you are to become discontent.

David Rand of Harvard is one of the study’s authors. He said this study was designed to understand how changes in long-term emotional states – meaning, whether you consider yourself a happy or sad person overall – are affected by the people you know.

We found that sadness is twice as infectious as happiness.

Rand and his co-authors compared emotional states of groups of friends, families, and coworkers to models of how infectious diseases – like the flu – spread. Then they looked at the probability that a person would become happy or become sad, based on the number of happy or sad people around them.

One aspect that’s new is that we showed in a formal sense that these long-term emotional states really are contagious. Which is interesting, and it’s important for trying to understand why people feel the way they do about their lives. Rand said that understanding the “contagious” aspect of emotions was key to the study.

A contagious process is something where your probability of contracting it–if it’s a disease–depends on whether your friends are sick. If you think about your probability of catching the flu, the more sick friends you have the more likely you are to get the flu. That makes it contagious. So we find that same thing with happiness or sadness.

Rand and his co-authors used data from the Framingham Health Study, which has been collecting health and social information from the community of Framingham, Massachusetts, for the past 40 years. They deduced the real-life social networks of the town based on information the study participants filled out about their family, work, and contacts. The information about emotions came from a standard 20-question psychology survey that categorizes people as happy, sad, or neutral.

In order to ask whether the process is infectious or not, you want to know, if you are in a “neutral” state, is there a probability of switching from neutral to happy increasing in your number of happy friends? So we took all the people who were neutral, in the first measurement wave, and we asked how many of them had zero happy friends. We looked at all the people who had no happy friends, and asked how many of them switched from neutral to happy. Okay, what about all the people had one happy friend, two happy friends, and so on.

They found that, like the flu, the more friends a person had who were happy, the more likely the person was to become happy themselves. Additionally, they found that sadness was more transmissive than happiness – meaning, it takes fewer sad friends to make you become sad. But Rand added that people recover from sadness more quickly than they recover – or change states – from being happy.

So dump all those sad sacks, and get on the Happy Train, folks! Happy Holidays…later Scrooge!!!

People who spend time with happy people are more likely to become happy themselves. That’s according to a July 2010 study that examined how emotions spread contagiously.

We found that sadness is twice as infectious as happiness.

So dump all those sad sacks, and get on the Happy Train, folks! Happy Holidays…later Scrooge!!!

Radiation’s upsides and down

Stand By Her — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:54:50 +0000

Medicine is a very complicated thing. This is proven by the article that appeared in today’s New York Times. The lesson to learn here is to have a checklist that does a double-check to settings before administering dosage. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/health/24radiation.html?hp

A Doctor’s op-ed piece in the Washington Post about how to fight a smarter war against cancer

Stand By Her — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 15:25:18 +0000

Dr. John L. Marshall is the Director of the Otto J. Ruesch Center for the Cure of Gastrointenstinal Cancers at the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center at Georgetown University. That’s a mouthful of a title, but he wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post last month with a call to action for cancer research dollars to go more towards clinical trials (since fewer than 5% of patients right now are on clinical trials) and less money towards “evidence-based medicine” – meaning offering only those therapies that have been proven to help patients live longer, or at least live better. I know that my wife, Sharon Rapoport, is alive today because she was on a clinical trial for Herceptin in which early-staged breast cancer was treated with this drug. Here’s an interesting section of Marshall’s piece to think about in which Dr. Marshall believes the cure lies at the molecular, and not the generic level…in other words, “”personalized medicine:

In this country, the highest hurdle we must leap is our patients’ expectations. Cancer patients facing death want treatment; they want hope that they will be cured, even if they have been told that they cannot be cured. They will try toxic treatments over and over, hoping to extend their lives. We physicians are co-conspirators. Of course, we also want to believe that the next treatment will help more than the last, even though we know that is rarely the case. What if we had to pay for all this out of our pockets? Would we pay that much for some possible hope?

I believe we can invest more in actual hope. To do so, we must further explore the genetic makeup of patients and their cancers. We can no longer diagnose cancers using only a microscope. We must profile them at a molecular level to determine precise treatments, instead of using our current trial-and-error approach.

To assess a patient’s specific genetic problem, we must understand all the possible permutations and patterns. This will come only from a comprehensive clinical database — a high priority of the administration’s reform plans. For example, we know there are at least four different types of breast cancer; they look exactly the same under a microscope but are very different diseases. The repeated biopsies and blood tests that are needed, none of which is covered by most health insurance plans, will become critical to finding our answers.

The future of cancer care will rely on personalized medicine. To read the entire piece, click below:

Fighting a Smarter War on Cancer

Thanksgiving

Stand By Her — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 03:27:10 +0000

It’s so important to be thankful that you will be with your loved ones this Thanksgiving. To give thanks for everything she has done for you. Worry about what lies in store for all of you next week. For now, just focus on the present and be there, in the moment. Thanksgiving is all about gratitude for what you have, today.

Out of time

Stand By Her — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 02:58:23 +0000

Time seems to take on a different dimension when your loved one is going through treatment. It seems, at times, that you are having an out of body experience as you wait with her before a doctor’s appointment, or while she’s getting chemo, or when she’s getting a radiation treatment. You look over at the magazine rack, but there’s nothing for you to read. And you don’t know what to do, some times. Just take a deep breath, and know you are doing the best thing of all – you’re there with her. And that’s good enough.

Round 2, Round 3, Round 4…

Stand By Her — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 03:39:21 +0000

rocky

To use a running analogy, surgery is like a sprint—hard but fast, efficient, and over quickly. Chemo is, of course, a longer run, often lasting either three or six months. Inevitably, as the treatments progress over time, you settle into a routine just like you do when running a marathon.

Chemo Land is such an alternative universe that it often feels like you’re running to an unknown finish line.

Maybe the better analogy is boxing. Each treatment is another round. As each round progresses, it gets harder and harder to climb back into the center ring for her, and for you. But a breast cancer fight is a whole lot longer than a twelve rounder. It doesn’t end when one combatant falls to the canvas for a ten count. It is a battle to the death. And you can help make sure she is the winner.

The greatest fighter-philosopher of all time, Rocky Balboa, had this to say about what the fight for life is all about:

The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It is a very mean and nasty place, and I don’t care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard you hit; it’s bout how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward. How much you can take, and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done.

So keep moving forward.

It’s OK to Take a Cancer Land Leave Pass Now and Then

Stand By Her — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 22:20:12 +0000

It is important, when you are in Chemo Land, to take a break from the journey. As a caregiver, you need to find a little rest stop of your own, where you break routine and recharge your batteries. You need to find, for yourself, some form of a Cancer Land leave pass.

This doesn’t mean that you don’t return to your post. It simply means that you step away to regain your strength so you can carry on. You should clear your pass from Cancer Land with your loved one before you head out, because you don’t want her to feel abandoned. But if she’s like my wife, mom, and sister, then you won’t have any problem getting ‘‘permission’’ to go. That’s all fine, you say, but where do I go? The break doesn’t have to be a big thing. You can ask your best buddy to join you for a beer, a round of golf, a run in the park—anything to get you out of the house and away from thinking about cancer, cancer, cancer.

Being Comfortable with Baldness

Stand By Her — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 22:14:26 +0000

John Anderson's family- Sharon, Seth, Isaac

One of the most difficult things your loved one will face during her treatment is losing her hair (if she receives chemo, of course). My wife, Sharon Rapoport, had difficulty with this, at first, but then over time embraced it.

She wasn’t going to let cancer get the best of her, and she certainly wasn’t going to let baldness get in her way, either. In the beginning, she wore wigs, then moved to scarves, then finally ditched all head coverings and went out in public au natural.

This shot is amazing. She is comfortable with her look, as are our kids – all because it was OK for her to be seen in public this way. Other women will not be comfortable showing their bald heads, and that’s totally fine too. Whatever she wants to do, is the way it should be. Period.