ABSTRACT
When I began the research on long-term survivorship from cancer diagnosed in adolescence or young adulthood, I had no upper age limit in mind but assumed that most participants would be within 10 or 15 years of their treatment having finished. However, I was surprised that recruitment through the charitable sector – where participants were self selected rather than approached by health professionals through follow-up clinics (see methods appendix), long-term survivors of more than 40 years duration volunteered to participate. Clearly the experience of survivorship at 5 years is likely to differ from that at 40 years yet there may also be factors that unite survivors and the quality of survivorship.
