Guest blogger: Idelle Davidson

In researching and co-authoring Your Brain After Chemo: A Practical Guide to Lifting the Fog and Getting Back Your Focus, Idelle Davidson interviewed countless survivors who reported often debilitating cognitive issues following treatment for cancer.  She wanted to know if there were any legal protections available to them in the workplace, or at home if they could no longer work. She spoke with Joanna Morales, an attorney and the director of the Cancer Legal Resource Center. Both Idelle and Joanna graciously agreed to let Fight Colorectal Cancer re-post the interview.

Q and A With Joanna Morales

ID) What is the legal standard to qualify for a disability?

JM) To have a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act’s (ADA) definition of disability, you have to have a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits major life activities, have a history of an impairment, or be regarded as having an impairment.

Major life activities have traditionally been things like walking, talking, eating, breathing and working. But when the ADA amendments passed in 2008, they specifically delineated some additional major life activities that made it easier for someone with cancer to actually use the ADA’s protections.

And those activities include sleeping, concentrating, thinking, communicating and operation of major bodily functions. Read the rest of this entry »

Having trouble remembering? Does your thinking seem fuzzy? Even years after chemotherapy, does it seem like you can’t focus and are wandering around in a fog?

Learn more about cancer treatments and thinking, memory, and attention during a free CancerCare telephone workshop.

• The Ninth Annual Cancer Survivorship Series: Living With, Through and Beyond Cancer
• Part I: Chemobrain: The Impact of Cancer Treatments on Memory, Thinking and Attention
• April 12, 2011
• 1:30 to 2:30 (Eastern)

Registration is free, but you must sign up. In addition to the telephone, the workshop will be streamed via the Internet.
Read the rest of this entry »

Very real.

Brain MRI’s before and chemotherapy found changes in brains of women being treated for breast cancer.

Women who had breast cancer surgery but didn’t have chemo had similar changes, but they were less severe. Brains of healthy women remained stable.

Changes were in gray matter in areas of the brain involving memory and the ability to process information.

A year later most– but not all — areas of the brain had returned to normal. Read the rest of this entry »

Briefly: The elderly are much more likely to have their colons perforated during colonoscopy, and inflammatory bowel disease patients who are part of a colonoscopy surveillance program before a diagnosis of colorectal cancer are diagnosed at an earlier stage and have much better survival than patients who don’t have colonoscopies before diagnosis.

There is help online for seniors and their caregivers who are having surgery and cancer survivors who are coping with “chemobrain”.  The FDA is cracking down on the unapproved marketing of some codeine drugs. Read the rest of this entry »