Confidence and Reassurance
Like Mort, I believe that physicians can greatly influence our confidence by giving us reassurance. That doesn't mean painting rosy pictures. It means finding a way to help us maneuver through the maze of emotions we feel, and that could be the subject for a whole essay!
I was so lucky to have had a great medical team who never treated me as a collection of cells that needed to be fixed. Instead, they instinctively knew that the emotional aspects of cancer can be just as devastating as the physical ones, and they squeezed my hand or gave me a hug just as easily as they poked, prodded, knifed and drugged me. They also never gave up on me, even when I relapsed twice during treatment with chemo. Their confidence and reassurance helped me to believe that I would get well, and it made a world of difference in how I responded to them as well as to my illness because I knew that I had a whole team of people who were working hard to save my life, and that was a great comfort. Every patient deserves the same kind of team.
When radioimmunotherapy was approved and I was finally able to have it, my confidence soared because I knew at last that there was a treatment that might actually arrest the disease. And it did!!!! It gave me the best present I've ever had - nearly four years of happy, healthy living, and I'm still counting on many more.
Betsy