For months after her diagnosis of non-Hodgkins lymphoma, Jen Singer operated on full-throttle fight mode. The 40-year-old mother of two had been diagnosed with a 15-centimeter stage 3 mass in her left lung; the malignancy wrapped around her heart. Singer endured several weeks of aggressive chemotherapy in the hospital, followed by four rounds of outpatient chemotherapy and, soon after, five weeks of radiation, totaling 25 rounds.

   To outsiders, it seemed like Singer handled it all. She negotiated an extension on her looming book deadline, writing the final chapters -in bits and pieces- -from her hospital bed. She refused to halt her New Jersey home's extensive renovation, which included a kitchen demolition, an addition, and a new roof, among other construction headaches. She strived to retain a sense of normalcy for her sons, ages 10 and 8.

  Amid it all, the humor writer approached her diagnosis with, not surprisingly, a steady patter of jokes. She joked about her "G.I. Jane" hairdo after ditching her head scarf. She pointed out the wisdom of gutting her kitchen, given that everyone was delivering meals to her doorstep anyway. She wisecracked that the mass, when she first spotted it on a PET scan, looked like "I'd inhaled Connecticut."

  It wasn't until December 2007, weeks after treatment ended and six months after her June diagnosis, that Singer realized it was OK to wallow a bit - to be angry or morose or edgy about the future. In subsequent weeks, she cycled through the various stages of grief, even after the cancer went into remission. "I still have a one in four chance of it returning this year; it's still touch and go," Singer says. "And it's OK to be upset about that."

  During those months of fighting cancer, that final day of treatment can beckon as an enticing respite, a punctuation mark and, above all, a stair step back toward one's pre-cancer life. Increasingly though, clinicians are realizing that the reality can be far more complex logistically and emotionally, a transition - dubbed the re-entry phase - that can require months or years to navigate. Contact for complete article.