Quality of Life Resources
Research has increased the chances for survival after a melanoma diagnosis dramatically in recent years. Survival alone is not enough, however. An equally important issue is how well are you living with melanoma? Whatever your prognosis, you want to live a life that is meaningful and dignified. You will need strategies and resources to help you deal with anxiety and, possibly, the pain that comes with melanoma treatment so that you can live each day to the fullest, whether it is for the next year or the next 50 years.
Mindfulness
Jon Kabat Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness
Based on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s renowned mindfulness-based stress reduction program, this classic, groundbreaking work—which gave rise to a whole new field in medicine and psychology—shows how to use medically proven mind-body practices derived from meditation and yoga to counteract stress, establish greater balance of body and mind, and stimulate well-being. Engaging in these practices and can help manage chronic pain, promote healing, reduce anxiety and feelings of panic, and improve the overall quality of life both for those dealing with a cancer diagnosis and their caregivers .
Living and Dying Well
Stephen Levine: Healing into Life and Death
Drawing on years of first-hand experience working with the chronically ill, Levine presents techniques for working with pain and grief. Addressing the choice and application of treatment, discussing the development of a merciful awareness as a means of healing, and providing practical meditation techniques as well as personal anecdotes from his career, Levine crafts a valuable resource for anyone dealing with a cancer diagnosis.
Paul Kalanithi: When Breath Becomes Air
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.
What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir.
Five Wishes
Five Wishes is an advance directive document designed to be accessible, legal, and easy-to-understand with the goal of helping people discuss and document their wishes in a non-threatening, life-affirming way.
The Conversation Project
The Conversation Project® is a public engagement initiative with a goal of helping everyone talk about their wishes for care through the end of life, so those wishes can be understood and respected. It is founded on the belief that the place for this to begin is at the kitchen table—not in the intensive care unit—with the people who matter most to us, before it’s too late.The Conversation Project offers free tools, guidance, and resources to begin talking with those who matter most about your and their wishes.
The Endwell Project
End Well is a 501(c)3 non-profit dedicated to the belief that all people should experience the end of life in a way that matches their values and goals. When faced with issues of mortality, we often suffer needlessly for a variety of reasons, from cultural and clinical to matters of access. End Well brings together a multidisciplinary community that unites design, technology, health, policy and activist initiative to create a cultural shift to transform our thinking about serious illness, caregiving, grief and the end of life.