Much more of what I have learned about psycho-oncology over the years has came from my personal experiences as a two-time cancer patient. My first encounter was with lung cancer, a carcinoma, requiring a lobectomy in 1989. It was hair-raising, stressful, and instructive.
I got over it.

Having lived to tell that tale, I then developed a second, entirely different malignancy in 2001. That was my stomach cancer, GIST, for which I am still in follow-up treatment. My partial gastrectomy and splenectomy also required an emotionally stressful but fortuitous rescue by the combined and timely skills of major surgery, followed by a prolonged post-operative recovery. Prolonged post-operative recoveries from cancer operations are also part of our GIST psycho-oncology.

Having twice been a cancer patient both personally and professionally, if you will, I became an ongoing participant, an oncology student of sorts, and a witness to when, how, and why cancer-experiences affect our perceptions, attitudes and behaviors. Those things I learned as a patient.

Four years ago, GIST was also a professional wake-up call for me. Like many of you, I promptly began to study everything I could find out about GIST. I went back to the books, but GIST wasn’t there. Not by that name, because we lacked the technology, the immuno-histochemical concepts and techniques to recognize GIST for what it was. And we still do not know all that it might be and mean in terms of the complexities of gene expression, cell signaling and protein chemistry.

I had, in my many years of psychiatric practice, somehow encountered a fair number of persons who had experienced cancer themselves, or even more painfully and stressfully in their child, spouse or another closely held person. I indeed remembered them. And so, I went back to find those portions of my old scribbled notes that focused on some of the ways in which their personal lives had been stressed by cancer. I saw in them things I had missed the first time around.

How else did I become a psycho-oncologist? I have perused much of the professional literature pertaining to psycho-oncology. There is also an enormous amount of written materials, numerous books and articles on such subjects as how to cope with cancer. There have been, as well, a number of very moving and perceptive literary accounts by cancer patients with much talent in writing, as well as in looking into themselves.

Finally, like a number of our cybermates I have, during the past four years, had the equivalent of a second four-year college education in reading the many words of our fellow patients who have been posting to our GIST support cancer groups. I read most of them as a fellow patient very quickly just as you do, but some of them, I must confess, spoke as well to my special interest in psycho-oncology.

Well, there you have it - where I am coming from. We need to share, to know where you are coming from, if we are going to do our best to study and learn more about our GIST psycho-oncology together.