Caregivers can easily develop bad habits when their loved one is sick. For some, its not eating healthy, for others its not getting enough sleep. For me, it was over-researching my mother's illness online. I was guilty of spending hours on the internet sifting through piles of information on lymphoma, chemo and transplants. There are a number of excellent websites that give reliable advice on how to cope with cancer, but there are just as many that provide incorrect and unreliable information. It turns out Wikipedia is one of those websites....go figure! Even though I would never use Wikipedia for my school work, I found myself browsing the site for information on chemotherapy. It sounds crazy (because it was!), but I was desperate for answers. I wanted to be able to predict the future, to understand what was happening to my mother and to find some piece of information that would make everything better. Though I had the best of intentions with my research, I only ended up causing problems for myself. There is a lot of doom and gloom online about cancer. For every happy story of survival, there seem to be a dozen about loss. You become overwhelmed by all the scary facts and figures and forget that each person's cancer is different. After looking up information online, I often found myself more anxious than enlightened.
The internet can be a great tool for finding information on cancer and treatment. There are forums where survivors and caregivers can go to share stories and experience. For the record, I did find some very helpful information online, although I did have to sift through a lot of garbage to get to it. The US National Institute of Health has some good advice for internet research: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/evaluatinghealthinformation.html.
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