Kairol Rosenthal, author of Everything Changes, blogged today about this question:

Most of us need insurance, money, and love to make it through cancer.  But what about the smaller, less conspicuous items that helped you through the medical and physical challenges of surgery, chemo or radiation?

And then she asked this question, and made this request:

Pick your top five items (or more if you’d like) and leave them in the comment section, noting the kind of cancer you have and what your treatment or surgery was.  Don’t worry if someone already mentioned one of your favorite items – duplicates only reinforce how necessary and helpful the item is.

If  20 people give us their list of five, we’ll have over 100 helpful hints for the next person who is in our shoes.  So, forward a link to this post to other friends in the cancer community and ask them to contribute their top five too.

My five (well, okay, seven) were:

- my cell phone
– my PDA (to take notes, play games, keep my contact numbers at my fingertips)
- (already mentioned and absolutely essential!) my iPod nano loaded with audiobooks and great playlists. In fact, I splurged on my first-ever iPod in 2004 when dx’d, to help me get through the 7-10 hour long Folfox/Avastin infusions.
- a very small backpack to keep everything close to my bed hanging off the bed rail
- an extension cord – I think it was around 6 or 9ft. long. Compact, but just enough to be able to bring electricity from the wall plugs to my bed, so that i could plug in all those small electrics
- party straws: a friend sent me to MSKCC with party straws – neon colored bendable straws with those little drink umbrellas built into some of them and pink flamingos on the others. Like the candy and chocolates, every doc and nurse who saw one of those little party umbrella straws sticking out of my plastic cup of chipped ice smiled, and that definitely eased the tension of 27 days in the hospital (they just never got old)
- slide-on shoes (my crocs or birkenstocks)

for treatments and post-op, I added:
- scrubs (elastic or tie waist pants, lotsa pockets, loose-fitting and easy care)
- button-front henley tees, short and long sleeves for any season. Henleys made it easy to access my port, hook up my infusion lines and even place ECG patches – and the variable button fronts meant I could maintain the illusion of modesty. During cold-weather treatment, I often wore a Henley tee under a scrub top for the ultimate easy-access but layered warm outfit.

I also mentioned that I found after the first hospital stay that I didn’t want or need any personal clothes in the hospital to wear. For one thing, I was far too bloated by the surgery/anesthesia to wear most of my clothes…and had no one and no place to do personal laundry since I was in a hospital 350 miles from home. I realized that the only things I really wanted were some completely disinfectable supportive shoes (hello, crocs!) and some very loose-fitting clean clothes to wear home (hello, scrubs!)

What five things helped you get through treatments and/or hospital stays? Feel free to leave a comment on this post (I’ll forward them to Kairol) or visit Kairol’s blog and comment here.