Surviving Cancer: The Hidden Emotional Battle

In this article I discuss the profound impact of cancer on individuals and society, focusing on personal experiences and mental health challenges faced by survivors. It emphasizes the importance of prevention, understanding risk factors, and the emotional toll of cancer. Despite survival rates improving, many experience ongoing anxiety and depression post-treatment, necessitating better mental health support.

My husband and I have almost lost count of the number of friends and family who have been diagnosed with cancer in the last few years. You may be able to say the same.

Some of them are doing well after grueling treatment regimens that sapped their strength and their hair. For some of them, we have celebrated their life with their loved ones at poignant memorial services.

Cancer touches all of us in some way. Whether it’s our own health or a family member, cancer robs us of time, freedom, peace of mind, and money. Cancer costs our society in terms of increasing insurance premiums, funding needed for research, and lost productivity.

Right now our best defense against cancer is prevention. We should all know the risk factors, especially those that pertain to us. We are learning that genetics contributes to many cases.

But lifestyle still remains the biggest variable that we can potentially control. Use of and exposure to tobacco, alcohol, ultraviolet light, workplace toxins, and diet should be targets in our cancer prevention efforts.

Cancer also takes an emotional and mental toll on those affected and their families. This article I am sharing from Iowa Public Radio via KFF Health News puts faces on this aspect of cancer,

More Americans Are Surviving Cancer. But the Mental Health Challenges Can Persist.

By Natalie Krebs, Iowa Public Radio

A woman with brown hair tied up in a bun stands inside a building near some windows. Snow is on the ground outside and people sit a large tables behind her.
Morgan Newman was diagnosed with stage 3 cervical cancer at age 24 but has been free of cancer free for a decade. She says she still deals with lingering fears of the cancer returning. (Natalie Krebs/Iowa Public Radio)

The cancer diagnosis came as a shock, disrupting Morgan Newman’s plans for launching her life. It was 2015, and she was working as a dental assistant in Des Moines, Iowa, while studying to become a social worker.

After an abnormal result on her Pap smear, her doctor brought her back in to check the tissue for signs of cancer. Newman wasn’t that concerned at first. She was only 24 years old.

“I didn’t think anything of it,” she said. Friends had received abnormal results, she recalled, “and they turned out to be OK.”

But during the follow-up examination, she started bleeding so heavily that the doctor stopped the exam and immediately referred her to a gynecologic oncologist. Newman soon learned she had cervical cancer. She had just moved into her own apartment for the first time.

An increasing number of Americans are getting — and surviving — cancer. There were more than 18 million cancer survivors in the U.S. in 2025, and the National Cancer Institute estimates that number will grow to 22 million by 2035. But long after completing treatment, many survivors face lingering mental health challenges that go unaddressed.

“Data provided by USAFacts”

Newman underwent six weeks of radiation and chemotherapy. Her scans after that were clear until the six-month mark, when her doctors found suspicious nodules in her lungs.

Newman endured additional chemotherapy, which had more side effects. It was physically exhausting. But she was also struggling psychologically as she watched her friends hit significant adult milestones.

“My friends were getting married, they were having children, you know, progressing in their lives and their careers, and I just felt stuck,” she said.

Newman had done therapy before, for anxiety and depression. But after she got sick, she had to quit. Therapy was too expensive now that she had her other medical bills. And amid the doctor appointments, college courses, and her full-time job, she didn’t have the time.

Newman’s cancer treatment ended, and the scans remained clear. By 2017, she had a new job with better health benefits. So she decided she could go back to therapy.

She worried that every ache and pain could be the cancer coming back. At times, it was emotionally difficult to spend time with her friends who had kids, because the radiation treatment had damaged her reproductive system, leaving her unable to have her own children.

Now, almost 10 years later, Newman remains free of cancer, and cancer prevention has become her passion. She started a new job in December as the Iowa grassroots manager for the lobbying arm of the American Cancer Society, and she has served on the boards of other cancer organizations in Iowa.

But she continues to go to therapy to deal with the lingering anxiety, as well as the lingering effects of her treatment, such as her infertility.

“The fear of the unknown really takes over and can physically impact your body, as well as your mind,” she said. That question kept circling: “What if the cancer is back?”

“Data provided by USAFacts”

Cancer’s ‘Silent’ Impacts

Studies show cancer survivors experience anxiety and depression that can last years after they finish treatment.

The advocacy group Cancer Nation surveyed patients nationwide last year. It found that about a third of those who had finished treatment reported anxiety about their cancer potentially coming back, as well as problems with not feeling like their “old self.” Only 1 in 5 of the surveyed survivors reported seeing a mental health professional.

Finding therapists who understand how cancer can affect people physically and emotionally can be a challenge, especially in states like Iowa. According to the Iowa Cancer Registry, the number of Iowans living five years after their diagnosis has increased about 0.4% each year since 2000, and the state has the second-highest rate of new cancer diagnoses. Researchers aren’t sure why, but the University of Iowa scientists who run the registry are taking a deep dive into the issue in a two-year, state-funded project.

Iowa is also largely rural. Some of the counties that have the highest cancer rates also have the fewest mental health workers. Newman went through several therapists before she was able to get an appointment with Julie Larson, a Des Moines-based therapist who works with a lot of cancer survivors.

“I just felt like I needed something more specific to what I was going through,” Newman said.

In Larson’s practice, it’s common for clients like Newman to start therapy months or even a year after finishing treatment, when they realize they aren’t feeling how they expected to feel.

“Physically, people’s bodies have changed,” Larson said. “And they are reconciling loss and grief. And those experiences are a little bit more silent, a little more invisible, and friends and family don’t often fully understand or grasp that.”

Larson said cancer survivors often seek her out because she understands cancer and the different forms of treatment people may have experienced.

“I’m not a doctor, but I’ve done this a long time. So I know what happens when people have Adriamycin. I know the treatment protocol for carboplatin,” she said, citing chemotherapy drugs.

A man in a dark blue suit jacket stands in front of a reception desk. A sign reading "MercyOne Richard Deming Cancer Center" is on the wall behind the desk.
Richard Deming, medical director at the MercyOne Richard Deming Cancer Center in Des Moines, Iowa, says the clinic has recently added services such as yoga and counseling to help cancer patients and survivors deal with mental health issues. (Natalie Krebs/Iowa Public Radio)

Oncology and Mental Health

When it comes to treating cancer, the field of oncology often neglects mental health, said Patricia Ganz, an oncologist and professor at the UCLA School of Public Health who has spent decades doing research on cancer survivors and their lingering challenges.

“We know how to give pills. We know how to give pain medicine, sleep medicines. But we’re not really schooled in the antidepressants,” she said.

There’s an increasing awareness about the need to screen for psychological distress in cancer patients and the need to provide mental health services for cancer patients and survivors, Ganz said, but expert-recommended screenings and referrals don’t always happen to the extent they should.

The MercyOne Richard Deming Cancer Center in Des Moines has started offering services such as counseling, music therapy, and mindfulness sessions to reduce stress for those in and out of treatment.

“You get cared for intensely when you’re getting treated for cancer,” By contrast, when people complete treatment, the care typically shifts: “It’s almost like, ‘You should feel fortunate that you’re cancer-free and just get on with your life.’”

Richard Deming

To treat cancer comprehensively, Deming said, doctors need to pay attention to far more than just physical symptoms. That requires a shift in the way doctors treat patients, he said.

“Every step along the way, whether it’s through diagnosis or treatment or follow-up, we have to ask, ‘What are the issues you’re experiencing?’” Deming said. “Not just: ‘Do you have cancer? Did we get rid of the cancer?’”

This article is from a partnership that includes Iowa Public Radio, NPR, and KFF Health News.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

After You Hear It’s Cancer-a book review

“After You Hear It’s Cancer” by Dr. Lori Leifer and John Leifer offers a comprehensive guide for navigating cancer diagnosis and treatment. Drawing on personal experiences, the authors provide practical advice on various stages of cancer care, including diagnosis, treatment, and post-treatment challenges, along with resources for support and advocacy.

Keep reading

Points to Ponder

How has cancer touched your life in the past year? What did you learn from the experience? Did it prompt any changes in how you approach your own health?

What more information do you need about protecting yourself from cancer?

There is plentiful “advice” on line about cancer prevention and cures. But your best souce of counsel is still a physician who knows you. Seek advice from that person who has invested time, money, and thought into knowing the most about you and how best to help you.

Learn more about the cover photo at this link.

Celebrating Life after Cancer

Celebration of Life Mural-The mural was created to honor those surviving the disease of cancer. The mural’s tiles are inscribed by cancer survivors and represent the continuous flow of life.

Keep reading

Exploring the HEART of Health

I appreciate your time reading this post and invite you to follow this blog and me on social media.

I share information and inspiration to help you transform challenges into opportunities for learning and growth.

Add your name to the subscribe box to be notified of new posts by email. Click the link to read the post and browse other content. It’s that simple. No spam.

I enjoy seeing who is new to Watercress Words. When you subscribe, I will visit your blog or website. Thanks and see you next time.

Dr. Aletha

Measles, Cyclospora-When Should You Be Concerned?

In this post I review the CURRENT outbreaks of preventable illnesses in the United States. I also discuss the significance of significant unlying conditions.

Have you wondered how they know the current cyclospora outbreak in the United States may have started with lettuce at a Taco Bell restaurant?

This article from KFF Health News explains how. Nurses from the local public health department call infected people and ask them about their eating habits.

Can you remember what you ate two weeks ago, the brand name on the package, and where it came from? What restaurant did you go to two weeks ago? If you didn’t order on an app or save your receipt, you might not remember.

Fortunately for the sake of disease tracing, some people do.

Nurses Chase Cyclospora, Aided by Interviews, Fast-Food Receipts — And the Messy Details

By Kate Wells, Aug 4, 2026

A woman holding a phone to her left ear sits in front of a laptop and looks at the screen.
Linda Kim, a nurse with the Washtenaw County Health Department in Michigan, has been helping to investigate the county’s 900-plus cases of cyclosporiasis since mid-June. Public health investigations of foodborne illnesses are complex, and that’s especially the case with cyclosporiasis, because symptoms can take as long as two weeks to appear after someone’s eaten contaminated food. (Kate Wells/KFF Health News)

Listen at this link.

More than 900 people in Washtenaw County, Michigan, have been sickened with cyclosporiasis since mid-June. Linda Kim, a public health nurse, has called more than 100 of them. Almost everyone has said the same thing: It’s excruciating, and one of the worst illnesses they’ve experienced.

But on a Wednesday in July, she called one man who said he wouldn’t mind having it again, actually.

“You’re enjoying the weight loss?” Kim said, laughing as she took notes in a small conference room at the Washtenaw County Health Department building, just outside Ann Arbor. “Well, I’m glad to hear that. At least you got something good out of it!”

Normally, Kim’s supposed to be working downstairs in the clinic, where families wait in gray plastic chairs in the lobby for free or low-cost immunizations. But she hasn’t been there in months.

First, a Measles Outbreak

In March, Kim was transferred to a different department to help deal with a measles outbreak that sickened seven people in the county, five of them children. It was an all-hands-on-deck situation; everyone worked overtime. The state issued an advisory urging families in Washtenaw and surrounding counties to get babies 6 months or older vaccinated ahead of schedule, if possible.

The contact-tracing calls for measles could be contentious, Kim said. People were suspicious, asking her how she knew they had tested positive, or why they should give her any information.

“People were like, ‘Oh, you’re just trying to restrict my life,’ or ‘You’re just trying to get information out of me and get me in trouble,’” she said. “It’s like, no, we’re actually not doing that at all.”

As she tried to explain to them, tracing the spread of the highly contagious virus and publicizing possible exposure sites was an effort to “keep it contained, so it doesn’t become something huge.”

Measles is highly contagious and spreads through the air when an infected person coughs or sneezes.
Then, Cyclospora “Exploded”

The county’s measles outbreak ended in late May. Then in June, reports of cyclosporiasis cases started pouring in — more than 11,000 so far in Michigan, including two deaths. Both people who died had “significant underlying health conditions that may have been impacted by cyclosporiasis and dehydration,” the state health department said on its website Aug. 3.

Health officials aren’t providing more details, department spokesperson Lynn Sutfin said in an email, but are stressing that cyclosporiasis generally isn’t life-threatening and that deaths from it are uncommon in the U.S.

Kim said the cyclosporiasis surveillance has been very different from her experience with the measles outbreak.

Now, people seem eager to divulge even the most graphic details, such as “pooping their beds, and, like, putting down towels and it’s not enough.”

Linda Kim, public health nurse

Since she’s a nurse, such confessions don’t faze her, she said. Still, staffers have hundreds of these calls to make, so they try to keep each conversation under an hour.

“Crunchy or Soft?”

But foodborne illness investigations are complex. Especially for this parasite, cyclospora. Symptoms can take as long as two weeks to appear after people have eaten contaminated food. And no one remembers what they ate two weeks ago, public health staffers said.

The interview process can be extremely detailed. Kim and her colleagues ask people to pull up their restaurant receipts, scroll through purchases on their grocery store apps, even try to recall details such as the exact brand of bagged salad mix they bought, or the type of taco they got at Taco Bell.

“Is that the crunchy one or the soft one?” Kim asked on a recent call, typing on a laptop decorated with cat and vaccine-themed stickers.

Kim has been working with the health department for two years, a period defined by federal funding cuts.

Federal Funding Cuts Hurt

Laina Stebbins, a spokesperson for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, said the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to public health grants eliminated a contract between the state health department and 44 of the state’s 45 local departments that funded 123 full-time employees.

Those cuts also affected the state’s disease surveillance labs, “reducing funding for equipment maintenance contracts, data modernization, and the ability to innovate laboratory processes during emerging disease response,” Stebbins said.

Some of that funding was restored after Michigan won a temporary restraining order against the Trump administration. But Washtenaw’s health department still had to scale back some disease surveillance and outbreak response work. Currently, employees who leave or retire aren’t replaced, except for those on the nursing team, which is hiring but still understaffed.

The county’s Health Equity Council, which aims to reduce health disparities, including in mental health, was shuttered suddenly in early 2025. Nearly a year later, it resumed its work, with funding at least through this September.

An image of a building where the sign on its wall reads, "State of Michigan Department of Health & Human Services."
Staff at the Washtenaw County Health Department in Ypsilanti, Michigan, have been working to trace the sources of the recent cyclospora outbreaks by conducting detailed, often lengthy interviews with hundreds of people. (Kate Wells/KFF Health News)
Slow Response from Federal Public Health

An employee from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been stationed at the department. During the funding chaos, the worker was fired, then rehired, then furloughed.

The federal response to cyclosporiasis has felt frustratingly slow, according to Christina Zilke, a nursing supervisor at the Washtenaw health department.

“It took them forever to say that this was lettuce, and fast-food restaurants were taking it off the shelves before the CDC ever said what it was,” she said.

During a July 14 press call, the deputy director of the CDC’s Division of Foodborne, Waterborne, and Environmental Diseases, Gwen Biggerstaff, said it’s not unusual for it to take a long time to identify a specific source for cyclosporiasis — if it’s identified at all. That’s partly due to the lag time between exposure and the appearance of symptoms, and the complexity of tracing this particular parasite.

Meanwhile, Zilke’s been stocking the coffee station and bringing in pizza, trying to keep up staff morale. It’s not a reward, she said. “It’s more like: ‘Here’s some food for survival. Here’s a break so you don’t quit.’”

Kim, for her part, remains enthusiastic about the job but said it’s been a surreal introduction to a public health career — first measles, now cyclospora.

“If nationally they don’t know what’s going on, how are we locally expected to know what’s going on?” she said. “And also just frustrating to be, like, ‘Wow, I don’t think even our government knows how important public health is.’”

But there’s no time to dwell. She has to move on to the next call, as soon as she can wrap up this one. She gives each person her work number, so people can call or text with any follow-up questions.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Underlying Health Conditions Explained

One term used in this story you’ve heard before –“people with significant underlying health conditions.” During COVID, these people were known to be at increased risk of severe disease, complications, and death. That’s true of many acute illnesses, not just COVID, cyclospora, or other infections.

What exactly is a significant underlying health condition? Simply put, any medical condition that involves a critical body organ or system-heart, lungs, kidneys, brain. An official definition of “significant underlying health conditions” is

 long-term or chronic medical issues that last for more than one year, require ongoing medical care, and can increase the risk of severe complications from infections like COVID-19. Examples are

  Heart Conditions: Heart failure, coronary artery disease, and cardiomyopathies.

  Chronic Lung Diseases: COPD, moderate-to-severe asthma, and pulmonary fibrosis.

  Diabetes: Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, particularly with complications.

  Obesity: Having a high body mass index (BMI) that strains organ function.

  Chronic Kidney and Liver Disease: Stage-based kidney disease or chronic liver failure/cirrhosis.

  Immunocompromised States: Active cancer treatments, organ transplants, or HIV.

The “one-year” means they are expected to last at least that long, not that we wait a year before considering them significant. Most of the ones listed become lifelong concerns.

Other significant medical conditions include age-the very young or old, pregnancy, neurological dysfunction, homelessness, and substance abuse.

These are also referred to as Chronic Diseases. However, some chronic diseases do not necessarily increase one’s risk of serious illness.

How do you know if you have one of these conditions? Usually, they are diagnosed when symptoms prompt someone to seek medical attention and undergo an appropriate exam and testing. But sometimes people walk around for years ignoring “minor” symptoms until they become major. By this time, heart, lung, or kidney disease can be in advanced stages, as can cancer.

But that doesn’t mean people without serious underlying conditions are not at risk of getting seriously ill or dying from COVID, measles, cyclospora, influenza, pneumonia, or any other unexpected disease or injury. We all need to be vigilant to protect our health.

Next Steps

If you have a serious chronic disease, how do you protect yourself from acute illnesses that might become severe or life-threatening?

What else do you need to know, and where will you get this information?

If you don’t have a chronic disease now, what do you do to prevent one? Do you wonder what more you could do?

Your physician can help you. Consider asking about screening for the chronic diseases mentioned above.

Review your family medical history. If a close relative has a chronic disease, you may be at increased risk.

Review your use of tobacco, alcohol, and other substances.

Last but not least, we all need to monitor our daily activities-what we eat, how much we sit, how much we move, and our sleep. These are all vitally important to good health, but often ignored.

Exploring the HEART of Health

Thanks to KFF Health News and NPR for this report. The cover photo is by Photo by SpotOn POS on Pexels.com.

You’ve made it through a long post with much information to digest. Take it one step at a time. One can get fatigued with too many good intentions.

I appreciate your time reading this post and invite you to follow this blog and me on social media.

I share information and inspiration to help you transform challenges into opportunities for learning and growth.

Add your name to the subscribe box to be notified of new posts by email. Click the link to read the post and browse other content. It’s that simple. No spam.

I enjoy seeing who is new to Watercress Words. When you subscribe, I will visit your blog or website. Thanks and see you next time.

Dr. Aletha