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Coping with Cancer in Early Adulthood: From Diagnosis to Treatment to Day-to-Day Life Changes, Navigating Your Cancer Journey
Empowering young adult cancer patients with expert guidance, practical strategies, and heartfelt real-life stories, Coping with Cancer in Early Adulthood draws on decades of experience from Cristina Pozo-Kaderman, PhD, and Saul Wisnia to help reclaim life and identity amidst the challenges of a cancer diagnosis.
Coping with Cancer in Early Adulthood explores the emotional, physical, and practical challenges faced by young adults aged 18–49 who are navigating a cancer diagnosis during critical life milestones in early adulthood. This guide provides actionable advice for managing emotional struggles, financial concerns, relationship challenges, and physical health changes caused by cancer.
Cristina Pozo-Kaderman is a clinical psychologist and director of the Young Adult Program and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Saul Wisnia is Dana-Farber’s senior publications editor. Drawn from their over fifty-five combined years of experience working with and telling the stories of early-adult patients, this guide will address topics such
-Mood and mental health changes
-Loss of independence
-Feelings of isolation
-Managing relationships
-Financial toxicity
-Fertility and sexual health changes
-Redefining “normal”
-Fear of recurrence and “scanxiety”
Meeting patients where they are in the cancer journey, Coping with Cancer in Early Adulthood aims to empower patients to advocate for themselves and tackle challenges head-on. Offering actionable self-care tips, expert-backed strategies, and real-life cancer survivor stories, this resource supports young adults and their caregivers in overcoming cancer’s emotional and physical toll to rebuild identity and find hope.
Coping with Cancer in Early Adulthood explores the emotional, physical, and practical challenges faced by young adults aged 18–49 who are navigating a cancer diagnosis during critical life milestones in early adulthood. This guide provides actionable advice for managing emotional struggles, financial concerns, relationship challenges, and physical health changes caused by cancer.
Cristina Pozo-Kaderman is a clinical psychologist and director of the Young Adult Program and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Saul Wisnia is Dana-Farber’s senior publications editor. Drawn from their over fifty-five combined years of experience working with and telling the stories of early-adult patients, this guide will address topics such
-Mood and mental health changes
-Loss of independence
-Feelings of isolation
-Managing relationships
-Financial toxicity
-Fertility and sexual health changes
-Redefining “normal”
-Fear of recurrence and “scanxiety”
Meeting patients where they are in the cancer journey, Coping with Cancer in Early Adulthood aims to empower patients to advocate for themselves and tackle challenges head-on. Offering actionable self-care tips, expert-backed strategies, and real-life cancer survivor stories, this resource supports young adults and their caregivers in overcoming cancer’s emotional and physical toll to rebuild identity and find hope.
- GenresNonfiction
256 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 14, 2025
6 people are currently reading
8 people want to read
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September 18, 2025
A comprehensive, compassionate look at the specific challenges and approaches targeted to assist patients with early-onset cancer (diagnosed in one who is eighteen to forty-nine years old).
As unbelievably challenging as a cancer diagnosis at any age is, the author, a clinical psychologist who has focused her practice exclusively on young adults with cancer, is clear that the rarity of this occurrence (only four percent of all cancers fall into this category) cannot help but propel the disease to even more potentially debilitating levels.
With less research available, young adults with cancer experience uniquely difficult issues including, amongst others: the largely unknown impact of longer-lived time periods following intensive medical treatment; social and emotional isolation; financial worries; parental issues involving young children; relationship challenges; career beginnings; educational setbacks; hormonal and mental health issues; developmental and identity issues.
With both candor and compassion, the author lays out suggestions, tools and approaches to help manage these problems, and more, all relayed in a warm and practical tone which cannot help but provide comfort and validation to any reader managing life under these circumstances.
It’s hard, the author acknowledges, to be so young and critically, perhaps terminally, ill.
It’s tragic, to be facing intense treatment, not once but perhaps many times, battling a disease with an uncertain outcome that may, if one is very lucky, be resolved, and not reoccur at all. Alternatively, one’s lot may be cast to require chronic mind-and-body battering treatment that reoccurs over decades. Which is still preferable to any other possible outcome.
The author’s acknowledgement and counseling here to those affected by all of these topics (even the most difficult ones) is critically needed and long overdue.
This is a book that belongs in the library of any patient, caregiver, family or friend touched by this topic.
A great big thank you to #Netgalley, the author and the publisher for an ARC of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.
As unbelievably challenging as a cancer diagnosis at any age is, the author, a clinical psychologist who has focused her practice exclusively on young adults with cancer, is clear that the rarity of this occurrence (only four percent of all cancers fall into this category) cannot help but propel the disease to even more potentially debilitating levels.
With less research available, young adults with cancer experience uniquely difficult issues including, amongst others: the largely unknown impact of longer-lived time periods following intensive medical treatment; social and emotional isolation; financial worries; parental issues involving young children; relationship challenges; career beginnings; educational setbacks; hormonal and mental health issues; developmental and identity issues.
With both candor and compassion, the author lays out suggestions, tools and approaches to help manage these problems, and more, all relayed in a warm and practical tone which cannot help but provide comfort and validation to any reader managing life under these circumstances.
It’s hard, the author acknowledges, to be so young and critically, perhaps terminally, ill.
It’s tragic, to be facing intense treatment, not once but perhaps many times, battling a disease with an uncertain outcome that may, if one is very lucky, be resolved, and not reoccur at all. Alternatively, one’s lot may be cast to require chronic mind-and-body battering treatment that reoccurs over decades. Which is still preferable to any other possible outcome.
The author’s acknowledgement and counseling here to those affected by all of these topics (even the most difficult ones) is critically needed and long overdue.
This is a book that belongs in the library of any patient, caregiver, family or friend touched by this topic.
A great big thank you to #Netgalley, the author and the publisher for an ARC of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.
Displaying 1 of 1 review