Today (July 3rd) I attended the first session of an 8 week course (Wednesday evenings) called
The Cancer Survivorship Programme
I'm looking forward to the programme because I, like so many cancer patients felt lost when my treatment plan finished. When you have your diagnosis, your treatment, appointments, check-ups etc, although obviously it's a horrendous time; you are swept up in everything that's happening. Once all that stops, it's a case of stopping and thinking "holy crap, did that really happen to me" and that can be a pretty overwhelming thing. There is also the non-stop fear of thinking that every ache and pain (that you would have ignored or thought nothing of before) is the cancer coming back.
The CSP helps you to deal with these fears, and also teaches about nutrition, exercise, mindfulness, mental imagery and other techniques. Although I realise that I may not agree with everything that is going to be taught, I am going into it with an open mind and looking forward to what I can learn.
Week 1
Tonight's session was just an introduction to the programme, next week is when we'll properly start.
Week 2
Following on from I attended week 2 of 8 tonight. This week it was all about Stress Identification, Assessment and Management.
Week 3
Today's session was all about Mindfulness, is was really useful and I will definitely be putting some of the techniques into practise.
Wiki Link to Mindfulness description
A good phrase I got taught (from someone else not The CSP) which really captures mindfulness for me is: Don't Borrow Tomorrow's Sorrow. Sam said he was going to add that to the next lot of course slides which is fab :)
Week 4
Today's session was all about Mindfulness again. This time about Affirmations and Progressive Muscle Relaxation.
Week 5
Tonight's class was all about guided Mental Imagery and Goal Setting. Both of these are things I do in everyday life anyway so I think for me these will be fairly straightforward to get the hang of.
Week 6
Tonight's class was a continuation of last week, we looked in more depth at Guided Mental Imagery.
Week 7
Tonight we looked at "The Anti-Cancer Lifestyle". So we examined the right foods to eat, what to eliminate from our everyday life, cancer fighting foods that we should be eating in abundance and the things that are best to avoid. This was the session I was perhaps most nervous about as I didn't want to be told, if you eat this you will get cancer. It wasn't at all like that though, Sam taught us that our bodies are like a balance/scale and all we need to do is tip the balance in favour of the anti-cancer. So if we can only add one good thing and eliminate one "bad" thing then the balance is tipped in the right way.
Week 8
Tonight was a the final class. It was a continuation of last week and we also looked at the role of exercise.
If anyone would like any of the workbooks from the course, please drop me an email and I will send them to you xx
