Although you cannot reverse your past exposure to asbestos, it is important you control those aspects of your life you are able to. This includes adopting healthy ways of living that promote the body’s natural fight against this cancer. This is especially true after your diagnosis and treatment for mesothelioma. During this period, you may have less strength and a weakened immune system due to surgery or chemotherapy treatments, making the adoption of a healthy lifestyle vital.

Maintaining a Healthier Diet

Although adopting a healthy diet can be challenging at any time, doing so directly following mesothelioma treatment can be especially difficult. Some of the common treatments used may cause intense nausea or even change the way foods taste. You may not feel like eating at all or see significant fluctuations in your weight.

These side effects can all be distressing, but it’s important to remember that most of these issues will improve with time. You may find it helps to alter your eating pattern until these feelings improve. Sometimes your cancer team can even recommend a nutritionist who can help give recommendations on how to lessen these side effects as well. Some of the more common dietary recommendations include eating more fruits and vegetables, which have cancer-fighting properties, and cutting back on processed foods.

Coping with Fatigue

Like nausea and other dietary disruptions, as a mesothelioma patient you may also experience fatigue during and after the course of your treatment. However, this level of tiredness is generally far greater than anything you typically experience and it does not always subside with rest. Some patients may continue to experience this fatigue for long periods of time, even after their treatment has ended. Unfortunately, this fatigue can keep patients from staying active, which may contribute to delayed recovery and depression.

However, exercise may actually help alleviate these feelings of depression and fatigue. During treatment, some patients may have simply been too weak or ill to engage in any form of physical activity. However, it remains important to begin an appropriate exercise plan as soon as possible after treatment. Often, initial exercise will be light and taken at a slow pace. This is to be expected. In fact, it is important to speak to your recovery team before beginning an exercise regiment to ensure you are not overly straining your body or putting yourself at risk.

In addition to improving your level of energy, healthy exercise can also provide other physical and emotional benefits, such as improving your vital cardiovascular health, lowering depression and anxiety, and improving your mood and self-image. Furthermore, doctors also believe that exercise can actual contribute to the prevention of some forms of cancer.

Avoiding Unhealthy Habits

Oftentimes cutting out unhealthy lifestyle choices is unavoidable. In some cases, these unhealthy lifestyle choices actually contributed or caused the disease. Although mesothelioma is not caused by smoking, doctors see a significantly higher rate of development in patients who do smoke. Other poor lifestyle habits include drinking excessively and failing to get the appropriate quantity of exercise on a daily basis. Although too little is currently known about mesothelioma to be sure that improving your lifestyle will definitely contribute to a lower rate of this cancer’s development or return after treatment, doctors are aware that these lifestyle improvements do have health benefits that extend beyond their impact on cancer.

Reference:

American Cancer Society