Hello everyone, I wanted to follow-up on Dr. West’s post about cancer survivorship a few days ago. The term “cancer survivorship” can mean lots of different things to different people. In this post, cancer survivors are those patients who finished their cancer treatment and are now being followed to see if their cancer returns and if they have any long-term side effects to the cancer treatment.

One important thing for all cancer survivors is to have a summary of your cancer treatment. A one page summary about your specific treatments – surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. There is no established guidelines for what the summary should state for lung cancer survivors. This summary will help you as time goes on and you get further away from your cancer treatment. It will also help other health care professionals taking care of you as it’ll be a quick summary of your treatment. Another important thing is to get the contact person and number for medical records of where you received your cancer treatment. That way, if you need to get your medical records, you’ll already know who to talk to.

In terms of what you can expect, there is very little information about long-term side effects to cancer treatments for lung cancer. Most of the information about cancer survivorship is obtained from adults who survived highly childhood cancer or from breast cancer survivors. Especially as we have more lung cancer cancer survivors, it will be really important that we get more information about their health after the treatment to try to keep healthy. A great example is the “how to quit smoking” post.

This is my first post, so please tell me if you need more information or explanation. I look forward to working with you all!

-Dr. McCune