Dialogues between Survivors and Caregivers: My Body after Treatment

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As a young person who went through illness, I’ve carried questions for a long time. Am I enough? What if someone comments on my body without knowing everything it has been through?

When I was hospitalized, my only real priority was getting out as soon as possible.

Nothing else mattered. Maybe it’s only in moments like that that you truly understand what matters most: that your body is healthy on the inside.

During treatment, there is so much tension and uncertainty that your mind doesn’t have space for much else. Everything revolves around appointments, results, and next steps.

You live between check-ups. You wait. You breathe when good news comes.

The moment I became ill, my body stopped feeling like it belonged only to me. Doctors took over. It was observed through scans, numbers, and protocols. It became something to manage, and I became someone who waits.

That’s when I started to feel there were two bodies.

There is the medical body. The one that responds to treatment, shows progress on paper, fits into clinical pathways.

And then there is my personal body. The one that carries fear, exhaustion, and a quiet loss of control.

These two don’t move at the same pace.

No one really prepares you for what comes after. For the moment when, medically, your body is declared healed and handed back to you. With a few more scars. With a different rhythm. And with the strange feeling that you need to get to know yourself again.

This is often when a quiet kind of dissociation appears.

On paper, you’re fine. Inside, you’re still finding your way.

Honestly, one of my biggest concerns after treatment was my physical appearance. I was a girl going through puberty, already dealing with big changes in my body. Looking in the mirror was hard. Trying on clothes reminded me that the body I had before illness was not the same body that came back home.

Some part of me expected to see the same person again.

I didn’t.

It took time to understand that I didn’t need to return to an old version of myself. Now I see a body that carries a story behind every incision, needle mark, and surgical scar. A story of survival. Of resilience. Of becoming someone new.

I’ve learned that healing isn’t only medical.

There is also a quiet, personal kind of healing. Learning how to live in your body again.

How to trust it ? How to accept change without letting it define everything about you ?

The medical system helped me survive.

Coming back to myself was something I had to do on my own. Slowly. Not in a straight line. Sometimes feeling lost.

It was about reintegration. About moving from a place where others take care of your body to a place where you begin caring for yourself again.

Not as a patient.

But as a person.

Erin Rupčić – Croatia

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Listening to you, I find myself asking difficult questions —
questions I did not always know how to ask while you were in treatment.

Should I have been a better doctor?
Was I fighting only cancer?

I ask myself this now,
knowing that survival is a journey, not the end of the story.
Knowing that while I was focused on treatment,
another kind of healing was quietly waiting,
easier to miss.

During treatment, the body must be observed, examined, and treated.
This focus is necessary — it saves lives.
But care does not end when treatment stops.

Healing continues in places we cannot measure —
in the mirror,
in memory,
in learning how to live in a changed body.
The body needs time to feel safe again,
to feel familiar,
to be trusted.

Accompanying survivors means more than follow-up visits and results.
It means acknowledging what the body has been through.
Respecting the pace of reconnection.
Walking beside someone as they reclaim their body —
not as a patient,
but as a person.

Returning to one’s body is a process.
One that unfolds not only physically, but also emotionally.
A gentle transition —
from being treated,
to living again in one’s body after cancer.

Prof. Jelena Roganovic. Pediatric oncologist. Children’s Hospital Zagreb, Croatia

After treatment, many survivors are medically considered “well,” yet their relationship with their body can remain fragile.
Not because something is wrong — but because the body has been lived through months or years of vigilance, exposure, and uncertainty.

As clinicians, we may underestimate the time it takes for the body to feel safe again.
To move from being examined and monitored, to being inhabited.

I don’t always know how this return happens.
But I do see that it cannot be rushed.

It is essential to acknowledge that this is not a universal or mandatory step.
Not all survivors experience a sense of dissociation, and not all feel the need for a conscious “return” to their body. Some reconnect quickly and intuitively; others do so later, differently, or without naming it at all.
There is no single trajectory — only individual ways of living the after.

Supporting this phase means accepting that recovery is not only biological.
It is also about rhythm, trust, and permission — permission to take time, to feel distant, or to reconnect gradually.

Perhaps our role is not to accelerate this process, but to make room for it — and to ensure that the path back to care remains open, flexible, and respectful.

Dr Charlotte Demoor-Goldschmidt. Survivorship Medical Doctor expert – Radiotherapy oncologist. CHU Angers, CHU Caen, Inserm U 1018, France