When linking the term side effects with cancer, horrific visions pop into most people’s heads. If you haven’t started the treatment leg of your journey yet, you may be imagining yourself bald, frail, and tired, with your face glued to the toilet bowl. But while some treatment-related side effects may be serious or debilitating, many of them are minor and only minimally impact a person’s quality of life.

Chicken soup is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the health benefits of incorporating soups into your diet when you’re undergoing treatment for cancer. Soups are a great way to get whole grains, vegetables, fruits, and beans into one dish, particularly if you’re short on time or energy. You can’t get more wholesome than that!

Cancer and its treatments can contribute to loss of appetite. Because the calories you get from food are energy, if a poor appetite results in not enough food intake, you may experience fatigue. Poor food intake may also result in weight or muscle loss, which can impair your immune function and make it more difficult to recover in between treatments.

Following are ten inspiration stories from breast cancer survivors — some of them in their own personal words. Survivorship is broken into three categories: Acute survivorship: This is just after getting the diagnosis of breast cancer. Women often experience "the shock" and immediately start thinking about life decisions.

Your body makes great efforts to fight off many diseases on its own, but it must have the right resources on its side to be able to do that. Poor nutrition reduces mental function and productivity as well as diminishes your body's immunity against diseases such as cancers.When you are getting sufficient calories for energy and sufficient nutrients to support body function and growth, you can say you have good nutrition.

Sometimes the option to remove both breasts is based on the disease, and sometimes it's based on the disease plus a patient's anxiety. The guidelines do state that if you have left breast cancer, you can have a lumpectomy with radiation or a mastectomy. Yet often women choose to remove both breasts to reduce the risk of getting another breast cancer.

Targeted therapy is also called biological therapy. It affects specific protein-receptor targets (called biomarkers) found only on cancer cells. These protein-receptor targets are responsible for the growth and spread of cancer cells. Targeted therapy medicines block the growth and spread of cancer because they interfere with processes in the cells that cause cancer to grow.

Breast reconstruction can be done at the same time as the breast cancer surgery (called immediate reconstruction). It can also be done in a two-stage process where tissue expander (a temporary placeholder) is placed at the time of breast cancer surgery. For the final breast reconstruction, a synthetic implant or tissue from another part of your body is used to complete the procedure at a later date.

There are several surgical options for treating breast cancer, but it is your stage of breast cancer that determines which surgical options are best for you. Breast reconstruction is when a surgeon rebuilds the breast using one of two main types of breast reconstruction: implant or your own tissue (tissue from belly, back, thigh, or buttock).