How to Make an Illustrated Cancer Journal

A Cancer Journal Is One of the Best Ways to Feel Better by Expressing Your Treatment Journey and Emotions.

When you receive a cancer diagnosis, the journey through treatment becomes a special part of life. During the hardest times of illness, this scrapbook-style journal is a comforting, therapeutic and creative way to tell your story and describe the process. It represents important milestones from the first day of diagnosis in a simple visual language. This personal cancer treatment journal creates a portable pocket exhibition with a unique story, showing how you have progressed from the beginning.

Ideas for Getting Started

Hospital Admission Page

Record your feelings at diagnosis in writing or drawings. Include the reason for your stay and your hospital wristbands. If surgery or necessary tests are planned, note these too.

Preparing for a New Look

This may be the most enjoyable page to create in your cancer scrapbook! When shopping for wigs, bandanas or headscarves, take plenty of photos wearing the ones you like. Try styles you would never normally wear and photograph them too. Print these photos and make a collage using scissors and glue.

Before and After

If you have started chemotherapy and are losing your hair, add before-and-after photographs or draw a simple, childlike self-portrait in the mirror showing your new appearance. Even if this is something you dislike, expressing your feelings in your cancer scrapbook may help you feel a little more comfortable.

When your hair has fallen out completely or you decide to shave it, you can gather a lock with glue and add it to a new page. You may also attach a photograph taken during shaving.

Pages for Your Loved Ones

As a person with cancer, you often hear “If you need me, I am here” from people who love you. But when you truly need something, only a handful of people may be available to ask. Setting aside pages for those wonderful, special people who help when you need it most creates memories of important shared moments you will remember later. Photos, drawings, writing, poetry or even a message can appear on these pages.

Surgical Scars Page

If you have had one or more operations, this page can symbolically describe the scars. What matters is letting the feelings from the hardest moments of treatment flow out of you onto a page. For example, you could describe breast cancer surgery and subsequent reconstruction. Or draw the scars and transform them by adding imagined patterns.

Hospital Friends Page

The connections and experiences you share with people receiving treatment alongside you in hospital will probably be very special. To remember these moments and honor your friendships, put any stories and photographs, funny or painful, on this page.

Remembering Chemotherapy Time

Date interesting, funny, sad, serious or other events that happen during chemotherapy infusions. Create a collage with photographs of your room and nurse and treatment documents no longer needed. You can keep the same kind of record for radiotherapy. Add brief notes on how you felt then and how you were affected mentally or physically.

Letting Your Feelings Out

Use any form of expression that comes to mind on this page. Different materials can strengthen your expression. A simple but useful example is making random scribbles with pens or paints in whatever colors you want. What matters is not creating an aesthetically pleasing image but releasing the mixture of feelings inside you. Scribbling like a mischievous child may help you relax. Remember, you do not have to show this notebook to anyone. If you do not wish to share it, tell your loved ones that it is private.

A Page for Your Doctors

Create a page covering how you feel about your doctors, treatment memories, things you could not say, difficulties and happy moments. Whether or not you like their manner as they try to provide the most appropriate treatments, let this be your private page to express it openly and freely.

Your portable pocket exhibition is complete!

Research shows that creative artistic activities contribute to positive mood, improve cognitive functions and reduce stress during cancer treatment. For a more peaceful treatment journey in which you can express your feelings, we recommend collecting your memories.