Control of other cancer symptoms

People with cancer may have a wide range of symptoms – some of them due to cancer, others caused by its treatment. Trying to cope with other symptoms may make it more difficult to cope with your pain. Often, other symptoms can be relieved by medical or non-medical treatments or by a combination of both. If your other symptoms are well controlled this can enable you to deal more effectively with your pain.

Pain may feel worse if you are very tired, and fatigue| (feeling exhausted all or most of the time) is a common and difficult problem for people with cancer. It can have a number of different causes.

Fatigue may be due to your treatment, the cancer, or it may be related to other symptoms you may have. There are different ways of treating fatigue depending on the cause, so always let your doctor know how you are feeling. There are also steps that you can take to make it easier to cope and to keep your energy for doing the things that are most important to you. This may mean being more willing to accept help from other people or making simple changes to the way you do things around the home.

Some research has found that exercise and keeping active can help to raise energy levels, but it is important that you don't feel that you have to exercise or keep going if you are too tired.

Most people with cancer have trouble sleeping at some time during their illness. Sleeplessness may be because of anxiety, fears about the future or due to disturbed sleep patterns. If you feel tired and doze during the day, then you are likely to find it harder to sleep at night. Pain is another reason for disturbed sleep, and can be helped with good pain control. Getting to sleep may be the hardest thing to do. If you are also depressed you may notice that you wake early – often around 3am or 4am – and find it difficult to get back to sleep. Most sleeping tablets only work for a few hours to help people get off to sleep, so they will not help if you wake in the early hours of the morning.

Relaxation|, counselling| and simply talking through the cause of any anxiety may be helpful for some people. It can help if you establish a regular routine at bedtime and go to bed at the same time each night. Try a warm milky drink before bed. Have a warm bath with a few drops of lavender or geranium oil to help you relax, or sprinkle a couple of drops on your pillow. If you can't sleep or you wake up early, try to relax and not worry about it. Rather than lying in bed tossing and turning, you could try listening to music or the radio, or you could get up and watch TV or read a book. Wait until you feel tired again and then go back to bed. Story tapes or CDs are also very useful for getting you to sleep and are stocked in most public libraries.

Your body will still get some benefit from lying quietly in bed resting, even if you are not actually asleep. Although you may feel as if you have been awake all night, you may well have managed to have several hours of good-quality sleep. Older people and people who have not been very physically active during the day need less sleep at night. If you are napping during the day and having problems sleeping at night, it may mean you do not need so much rest. See if it helps to limit yourself to one rest or sleep each day.

If you are taking steroid tablets, these can interfere with your sleep if taken in the evening or at bedtime. You may find it better to finish taking your steroids before the evening, unless your doctor advises otherwise. Sometimes a short course of sleeping pills may help to re-establish a more normal sleeping pattern and can get you over a particularly difficult patch.