ASCO: You’re listening to a podcast from Cancer.Net. This cancer information website is produced by the American Society of Clinical Oncology, known as ASCO, the world’s leading professional organization for doctors who care for people with cancer. The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guests’ statements on this podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement. Cancer research discussed in this podcast is ongoing, so data described here may change as research progresses. Brielle Gregory Collins: Hi, everyone. I'm Brielle Gregory Collins, a member of the Cancer.Net content team, and I'll be your host for today's Cancer.Net podcast. Cancer.Net is the patient information website of ASCO, the American Society of Clinical Oncology. Today we're going to be talking about the psychosocial challenges unique to survivors of gynecologic cancers and how survivorship care plans can be helpful to survivors of these cancers. Our guests today are Dr. Fay Hlubocky and Dr. Merry Jennifer Markham. Dr. Hlubocky is a licensed clinical health psychologist with an expertise in psychosocial oncology and a health care ethicist at the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois. She is also the Cancer.Net Associate Editor for Psychosocial Oncology. Thanks for joining us today, Dr. Hlubocky. Dr. Hlubocky: It's an honor and a pleasure to be here with all of you today. Thank you so much. Brielle Gregory Collins: Dr. Markham is Chief of the Division of Hematology and Oncology and a clinical professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. She is also the Cancer.Net Associate Editor for Gynecologic Cancers. Thanks for joining us today, Dr. Markham. Dr. Markham: Thanks so much for having me. This is going to be fun. Brielle Gregory Collins: Absolutely. Before we begin, we should mention that Dr. Hlubocky and Dr. Markham do not have any relationships to disclose related to this podcast, but you can find their full disclosure statements on Cancer.Net. Now to start, Dr. Hlubocky, what can survivors of gynecologic cancers expect during the transition from treatment to survivorship? Dr. Hlubocky: It's such a very important question. So this stage of survivorship, and if we think about the cancer survivor as anyone with the time of diagnosis, but especially when your treatment ends and that kind of later stage of survivorship begins, both anecdotal reports by survivors as well as research tells us this is very much a time of ambiguity. So complicated feelings such as depression and anxiety can still arise. But there's also this change in one's life and daily activities. So from the constant monitoring and treatment that the survivor actually had to go through and be engaged in constant contact with the team, now it's a time of sometimes emptiness. Patients have told us about not really knowing what to do, missing that contact, that monitoring. And so that can certainly leave us with a lot of complicated emotional distress. But also paradoxically, there are these feelings of greater purpose and feeling and meaning leading to post-traumatic growth. Might not be immediate. As soon as, of course, the treatment ends, there can be some difficulties, even with relationships and social relationships, and we can talk about some of the psychosocial challenges, but that's what at least has been reported both anecdotally also from a research perspective. Dr. Markham: I think that that's exactly right. I think what I see in the clinical side of the patient care is exactly that. I think a lot of people who just finished their cancer treatment don't quite know what to do with themselves. T