Review: Picking Up The Pieces

Picking up the Pieces: Moving Forward After Surviving Cancer, by Sherri Magee & Kathy Scalzo, 2006.

Public and Cancer Agency libraries in BC have copies of this book you can borrow, although if you like it, you’ll want to buy your own.

You can find a lot of books out there about life after cancer, recovery, and being a survivor. Like many of them, Picking up the Pieces has quotes from people’s own experiences. What is unique about Magee & Scalzo’s book, though, is the very practical, step-by-step things to do.

Your recovery journal will become your change-tracking system, progress map, and diary all in one. As you monitor your thoughts and feelings, you will see yourself moving from fragmentation towards wholeness.

I can feel encouraged by hopeful stories, and reassured by other’s struggles that I’m not alone, I’m not crazy. Still, it’s a leap from there to knowing what to do with myself each day and figuring out how to change my thoughts or emotions, or get a handle on the transitions. I don’t just want to be encouraged — I need to be coached!

This book will help you navigate the healing process, although we believe that ultimately you are the expert on what you need. The recovery program you find in these pages will help you integrate who you were before cancer with who you are now.

Picking up the Pieces has useful “self-scans,” essentially mini-quizzes to help focus our thoughts and direct our decisions. It recommends a directed type of journalling, using a “5 question check-in.” The authors give specific instructions on how to use Attentive Walking to cope with emotions and distress. All of these are wonderfully practical: I can do this! instead of, “how can I do that?”

Survivors have identified six realistic, specific goals that help ease the transition from being a patient to living well: guidelines; validation; support; empowerment; permission; reordered priorities.

I was particularly inspired by the section on designing a “Healing Plan.” The authors recognize the individual diversity in how we each approach healing and life, and so they talk about four characteristic approaches. These are the Physical approach, the Connected approach, the Creative, and the Contributing approach. Any one person may combine, for example, expression through creating in sewing or woodworking, with a new “healthy lifestyle” to maximize their physical wellbeing. Or any other combination. Just reading through the step-by-step plan design to making these priorities real, is inspiring.

Working with a plan will build your resilience so that you can address the multiple fears that continue long after the treatments are over. Remember: simple plans can be powerful healing vehicles.

It’s not a book for one particular age, gender, or type of cancer. There are six month survivors, 5 week survivors, and 10 year survivors who contribute their ideas. It’s the kind of thing you use whenever you are ready for it, which could be at any time. Maybe parts now, and then parts later. If you aren’t able to access counselling services right now, the authors have created Picking Up the Pieces to cover many of the strategies they use in counselling cancer survivors.

The only way through loss is grief. We need to grieve our losses — to honour and process our sadness and distress — in order to recover and move forward. p.145

The subtitle, “Moving Forward,” seems so important to me. If you are feeling “stuck” after dealing with cancer and the loss and change that comes with it, this book might help get the wheels rolling again.