Key Messages:

• Finishing treatment is exciting, but it can also be challenging and even frightening.
  
  
• Resuming a normal schedule after treatment can be difficult and may require you to redefine what you consider normal.
  
  
• Give yourself time to adjust to physical and emotional changes during this transition.

During the last few months, or maybe longer, you have been focused on your cancer treatment and recovery. Once treatment ends, your focus and needs change.

Emotional changes

Along with feeling happy, relieved, and excited, it is normal to experience mixed emotions:

• Scared that the cancer may come back again
  
  
• Anxious about returning to work or going back to school; self-conscious about how you look, possibly because of scars from treatment or hair that hasn't grown back yet (See Cancer and Body Image); upset that you can't do some of the things you used to because of changes to your body
  
  
• Isolated from your friends
  
  
• Guilty that you are recovering while some of your friends with cancer are still in treatment
  
  
• Worried about your own recovery—you may feel lost or lonely without the regular support and reassurance provided by your doctors and nurses
  
  
• Worried about medical bills and health insurance
  
  
• Uncertain about your future
  
  
• A sense of sadness for how your life may have been if you had not been diagnosed with cancer

Expect some changes

You will probably find that you're different now, in how you think and feel, than before you had cancer. Going through a major experience like cancer can make you look at your life in a new way. You may find yourself reevaluating your priorities and goals, such as career choice, educational goals, and relationships.

Coping with change

Some young adults find that they need help coping with changes in their lives after cancer. Many cancer survivors also find meaning in their cancer experience and gain a new perspective on life. Often, cancer survivors feel the need to share their story and help others living with cancer. Although you don't have cancer anymore, being a cancer survivor will always be a part of who you are.

Here are some suggestions that have helped other young cancer survivors adjust:

• Keep talking about how you're feeling, with a close friend, your parents or other family members, your nurse or doctor, or a counselor.
  
  
• Look forward to making new friends, including others with cancer.
  
  
• Keep in touch with people you have met, including young adults you may have met in online support groups.
  
  
• Keep going to support groups and, if possible, join a support group specifically for young adult cancer survivors.
  
  
• Keep writing in your journal, or start a journal if you don't already have one.
  
  
• Find a way to help other young adult cancer survivors.
  
  
• Do things you enjoy. Taking a break from cancer is important.

More Information

Life After Treatment

Cancer Survivorship

Cancer in Young Adults

Podcast: Finishing Treatment: What Comes Next?