Asking for information

Your own feelings and fears may make it difficult for you to ask your medical team the right questions and to remember the answers. It can be useful to:

• Try and think of the most important questions before the discussion with your doctor.
• Write down the important points on a piece of paper that you can take with you Every health care professional knows how difficult it is to understand and remember information, particularly when it is serious and when it is about you. Nobody will mind you writing things down or making a list of questions that you want to ask.
• Take a friend or relative with you to your appointments  They can help you remember things that the doctor says, and questions you want to ask but might forget.
• Remember, you will have other chances to ask questions  You can always make another appointment to ask your questions if you don’t cover everything in the first discussion, or if you are given surprising news that changes the questions that you wanted to ask.
• Ask for simpler explanations  If you don’t understand what you are told, it is fine to ask the person to explain again more simply.

Once your doctor or nurse has answered your questions, it’s a good idea for you to summarise their answers and say something like ‘So you’re saying that’ or ‘If I’ve got that right, you mean that...’ These words make it clear what you have understood, and can encourage your doctor or nurse to explain things more clearly if necessary.

Dealing with uncertainty

Often, definite answers are not possible so you may have to accept that uncertainties are common – particularly with questions about the future. When the conversation is about very serious things that threaten your health or your view of the future, you might think that your doctor or nurse knows what is going to happen but will not tell you. Usually, that is not the case.

With cancer treatment, there is very often a lot of uncertainty|. The doctors and nurses will not always be able to tell you exactly what will happen to you. For example, if a treatment has a 40% chance of success (and therefore a 60% chance of not working) there is often no way of knowing if you will be in the lucky 40% group or not. It may help you to cope with the situation if you can understand how your progress will be measured. You can say ‘So you’ll decide from the x-rays if the treatment is working.’

If you are unhappy with the care that you receive from your health care team, try and talk about your worries as politely as you can. If you can say what you are unhappy with and how this affects you directly, people can hopefully change the situation so that it becomes better for you.