BETA - Who is a cancer survivor?

A cancer survivor, according to the textbooks, is anybody who has been diagnosed with cancer from the moment that they are diagnosed with cancer. However, in recent years, there's been some more regulatory guidelines that have been expressed to further define survivorship. The Commission on Cancer, which is out of the American College of Surgeons, defines it a little bit differently in terms of a person, a cancer patient who has completed active treatment that has been done with a curative intent and is either from early stages to stage three. So that definition is a lot more limiting in terms of defining survivorship, much more limited, and keeping out, I think, folks who have chronic cancers or metastatic disease or patients who are stage four. So a lot of times, we try to encourage patients to decide for themselves if they are comfortable with calling themselves a survivor and when that is, and to embrace it if that's something they want to do. A lot of patients say, I want to call myself a driver. I still want to call myself a patient if they're undergoing active treatment. So there's a lot of room for interpretation in the definition of survivor. What is a cancer co-survivor? Co-survivor is anyone that walks that survivorship journey with a cancer patient. It can be a caregiver, a family member, a friend, a sibling, a spouse. It's anybody who is on that journey of cancer care, cancer treatment, and life after cancer with the cancer patient.