"Once you finish treatment, people start moving away from you because they assume you're fine now," she says. You may want to change jobs because you've had this meaningful, life-changing experience. "You may find yourself cutting off relationships that aren't working. "Your relationship to everyone around you is going to change," says Nessim, who is a survivor of rhabdomyosarcoma, a childhood cancer of the muscles, which she developed in 1975 at age 17. She also is author of Can Survive: Reclaiming Your Life After Cancer. "People should have information about the psychosocial issues that they're going to face when they walk out of the hospital door," says Susan Nessim, founder of Cancervive, a group that aims to assist people who have experienced cancer deal with return to normal life. The simple goal of survival for many cancer patients becomes so all-encompassing that many survivors are badly under prepared to a return to everyday life. "For some pediatric cancers, the cure rate can be even higher."
"For some adult cancers, the survival rate can be as high as 70%," says Lindsay Nohr, executive director of Fertile Hope, a nonprofit group that educates cancer patients about how treatment may affect their ability to have children. More than ever, a diagnosis of cancer today isn't necessarily the death sentence it may have been a 20 years ago. Although public health experts like to point out that overall rates of death from cancer have not budged, some cancers are a lot more survivable than others.