[김용의 헬스앤]
If you get cancer, there are not a few people who have a hard time with ‘loneliness’ than the cancer itself. Many cancer patients go beyond depression and experience depression. It is even worse for patients whose cancer is detected late and difficult to treat. Some suffer from sarcopenia due to pessimistic thoughts. If the muscle loss progresses rapidly, the immunity is greatly reduced, which can be more dangerous than the cancer itself. Patients with depression and sarcopenia have a poor prognosis (post-treatment course).
Extreme pain also plagues cancer patients. Although it depends on the type or stage of cancer, about half of patients already feel pain when cancer is discovered. More than 80% of advanced cancers complain of pain. If you can’t sleep properly because you’re sick, your strong will to fight the disease is broken. Even if cancer is detected at an early stage, chemotherapy can cause nausea, vomiting, and anorexia, which reduces the will to live. When a handful of hair falls out, even fear sets in.
Even if you get cancer, there are fewer cases where you think of ‘death’ as in the past. As the survival rate increases, there is a tendency to treat it as a chronic disease. Cancer is relatively easy to treat if detected early. Cancer is detected late because there are few symptoms in the early stages. If you feel the symptoms and go to the hospital, it is quite advanced. Lung cancer and liver cancer, which have high cancer mortality, are typical cancers that do not show symptoms even when they are sick.
Even early cancer can be quite shocking because of the connotation of the word ‘cancer’. Cancer patients say, “Why me?” and feel as if they are falling off a cliff. He is a cancer patient that he has seen many times around him, but he would not have known that he would become the person involved. Many factors are involved in the occurrence of cancer, such as smoking and drinking, bad eating habits, lack of exercise, and genetics, but there are not a few cases of cancer without knowing the cause. “I can’t believe I have cancer,” he goes to several more hospitals and repeats the cancer diagnosis.
The moment when a person who used to enjoy a free ‘single life’ regrets being single is when he lies down in pain. It’s not just a cold, but if you get a disease that takes a long time to treat like cancer, you desperately need someone by your side to wait on you and discuss. An elderly mother, brother or sister helps, but cannot stay with them all the time. There is no one to pat you on the back when you vomit with nausea while undergoing difficult chemotherapy. Having a paid caregiver and a person who truly cares about me is the difference between heaven and earth.
In order for cancer patients to feel less lonely and focus on treatment, they need help from people around them, such as family and friends. If you are an office worker, a word of warm words from company officials is no different than a thousand words. When office workers are diagnosed with cancer, they often think of leaving the company. The treatment is prolonged, so the leave is repeated, and even after returning to work, the aftereffects are obsessed with the thought of causing trouble to colleagues. At times like this, I am thankful for the seniors who give me ‘lip service’ by saying, “Don’t worry about work, coming back healthy is the most important ‘work’.”
There is a high voice that discrimination still exists in the return of cancer patients to society. There are also cases where prejudice against cancer patients prevented them from returning to work or their marriage was hindered. Young children with cancer suffer even more in school. Even if you barely succeed in returning to work, there are places where there is discriminatory treatment related to position and promotion. Considering the period of leave of absence, there are cases in which people despair over absurd greetings, even if they can understand it to some extent.
In some places, personnel management executives and department heads set strict standards to induce resignation. While sitting at a desk and considering productivity and work efficiency, cancer survivors are ruthlessly discouraged. Even those who treated cancer patients coldly, only paying attention to the boss, can become cancer patients at any time. How would you respond if the junior HR manager insisted on leaving the company? This is an era where one out of three people around you (36.9%) can become a cancer patient. According to the National Cancer Registry, 36.9% of Koreans may develop cancer if they live to the average life expectancy of 83.5 years.
Cancer survival rates continue to rise. The 5-year relative survival rate of cancer patients for the last 5 years (2016-2020) is 71.5%. 7 out of 10 cancer patients survive more than 5 years, which is the standard for cancer cure. Even if you are a cancer patient, you have to go back to work and go about your daily life smoothly. Should I join another company while hiding the fact that I have cancer? If you are a competent planning-personnel manager, you should create a reasonable manual in the company in line with the era in which cancer patients are greatly increasing. There should be no discrimination in job transfer or promotion.
If a cancer patient overcomes loneliness through family love during the battle against cancer and succeeds in treatment, co-workers should support and support survivors who have overcome cancer. It is because one day in an era where one in three people become cancer patients, I can experience it. It would be embarrassing if a cancer survivor could repeat the loneliness he felt in a hospital bed at a corporate office. These days, when cancer is becoming like a chronic disease, the way we look at survivors who have come back from cancer must change.
