What is treatment anxiety for childhood cancer patients?

2021年11月25日 2021年11月25日

hossikotyo

When I find out that my body has cancer, I feel anxious beyond words.
And in order to survive, it is necessary to weaken the cancer by surgery and administration of medicine.
However, both surgery and drug administration cause great damage to the human body, and it takes a long time to heal completely. I am very anxious when I have an illness that makes it difficult for my body to heal.
If I had been receiving treatment for cancer now, I would feel anxious about the treatment method because my symptoms did not improve easily.
Furthermore, in the case of children’s patients, the information such as treatment plans disclosed to patients will be limited to age-appropriate information.
That information limitation makes patients even more anxious.
When I developed cancer, I must have tended not to give too much detail to my child’s patients.
In my experience, when you limit information, you immediately feel it.
If you don’t get much information, you will feel more anxious.
That said, the difficulty of surgery and the side effects of the drug should not be expressed in a way that arouses the patient’s anxiety, but the information that the patient himself wants needs to be explained to some extent. I think.
In other words, for children, the following things can lead to treatment anxiety, so care must be taken when dealing with them.
① The treatment method is not informed
② The treatment period is unknown
③ Do not be informed of the treatment plan until discharge
Especially in (1), I think it is important to explain how to eliminate anxiety about the content and number of operations. In each case, it is necessary to consider the knowledge level according to the individual mental state and age of the patient.