Cancer and its treatment can affect people both physically and emotionally. It’s important to remember that not everyone is affected. Even for people who are affected, it’s different for everyone and can change over time. It can be hard to think about ways of adapting to any changes to your body, but it can also be fun to learn about enjoying it in new ways.
Cancer or its treatment may affect:
- your physical ability to have sex
- your body image (how you see yourself)
- your feelings (for example, fear, sadness, anger and joy)
- your relationships
- other things going on in your life, such as whether you’ve got back into work or studying.
The links between all these areas are important. If there’s a problem in one, it might have an impact on the others. In the same way, if there’s an improvement in one area, it can help improve all the others.
If you’ve had treatment recently, it’s important to give yourself plenty of time to recover. There are often ways of dealing with the physical effects of treatment on your sex life and if you want to talk to someone about it, there’s lots of expert advice you can tap into.
