Cancer patients often suffer psychic distress over tests; it's labeled scanxiety

Susan Gildin, a colon cancer patient, center, laughs with the nursing staff prior to her Rosetta Stone treatment at Jefferson's Rothman Institute, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, February 24, 2009. Gildin is one of those people who gets nervous before her CT Scans. (Ed Hille/Philadelphia Inquirer/MCT) Susan Gildin, a colon cancer patient, left, has her temperature taken by medical assistant Heather Ritchie before her chemotherapy treatment at Jefferson's Rothman Institute, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, February 24, 2009. Gildin is one of those people who gets nervous before her CT Scans. (Ed Hille/Philadelphia Inquirer/MCT) Ed Hille / Philadelphia InquirerSusan Gildin, a colon cancer patient, watches as a nurse prepares the chemotherapy IV for her recently at a Philadelphia hospital. Like many people who have received a cancer diagnosis, Gildin says she gets nervous before her periodic CAT scans. Judi Rothman found out a year ago that she had colon cancer that had spread to her liver.Every day since then, she has lived with worry.She can push it beneath the surface most of the time, but the minute her doctor tells her it’s time for another CAT scan, the fear springs like a cobra, suddenly too big and menacing to ignore.“In the back of your mind, it’s always there that the other shoe is going to drop, Rosetta Stone Spanish Latin and that becomes more active in the days before that CAT scan until I hear what happened,” said Rothman, who is 61 and lives in the Northeast. She gets CAT scans every other month to monitor her cancer.“I always think the worst,” she said.Rothman suffers from what cancer patients call “scanxiety,” the fear that punctuates their lives as “routine” tests approach.These tests that spy on cancer — telling patients when the disease is dormant and when it’s growing — give life a new emotional rhythm.For most healthy people, feelings pivot a little with unpredictable daily experiences — the grumpy boss or a friend who calls with a funny story.But in the parallel universe that cancer patients and their families inhabit, CAT and PET scans, MRIs and blood tests divide a life in regular Rosetta Stone American English increments of life-and-death fear, of ever-evolving hopes, and “new normals.”“The anxiety that comes prior to, during and then until you get the test results is one of the scourges of this disease,” said Kathleen Coyne, program director for the Wellness Community in Philadelphia. “ It’s really something that a lot of people don’t understand that don’t have cancer.”Each scan presents, as Lee Schwartzberg, a medical oncologist at West Clinic in Memphis, puts it, a “discrete existential crisis.”More time to worryAll this worrying is a relatively new problem. While cancer [Rosetta Stone ] was once almost always a death sentence, now patients live longer, which gives more time to fret. Some of the tests are also new, providing a different focus for fears that might once have homed in on physical symptoms alone.Increasingly, cancer experts are recognizing the importance of “psychosocial” problems like this.The influential Institute of Medicine in 2007 concluded that all cancer care should include treatment for emotional and social problems the disease causes, a standard that doctors say current funding systems make difficult to achieve.Jimmie Holland, a psychiatrist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and a pioneer in studying the psychological impact of cancer, advocates making emotional distress the “sixth vital sign” in cancer treatment.