Bermuda is now one of more than 20 countries where thousands of people take part in annual Relay For Life events. Organisers and participants in the weekend’s highly successful sponsored walk at the National Sports Centre are to be congratulated for their outstanding efforts.

The mission of Relay For Life is to raise awareness and funds to support cancer prevention and detection. One of the founders of the Bermuda event has succinctly described it as an effort to bring the community together in a collective endeavour to “celebrate, remember and fight back”.

That characterisation is accurate as far as it goes. But there are also a number of secondary purposes involved — among them, raising the morale and visibility of those who have battled and survived different forms of this disease. For they are fighting back in ways which are not always readily apparent to the rest of us.

Until relatively recently, many cancer diagnoses were widely regarded as a death sentences, and with good reason. Therapies were so haphazard, the results so random, and the side effects often so brutal, that researchers at one point concluded cancer treatment rather than the disease itself was the underlying cause for an estimated one in ten deaths among patients.

Today, many forms of cancer are increasingly well understood and treatments are continuously improved and modified to take advantage of new discoveries. In the US, the number of long-term cancer survivors who go on to live disease-free lives after treatment has more than quadrupled since 1971, and there’s every reason to believe the Bermuda statistics mirror the American ones.

For instance, as growing numbers of Bermuda women have embraced mammography and the benefits of early detection, scientists’ understanding of breast cancer has also been evolving. This is the most common form of cancer among women although, strictly speaking, it’s not even a single disease given there are at least four genetically distinct types.

But the emergence of increasingly specialised treatments for the various forms of the disease in recent years has kept pace with rising public awareness of the value of annual mammograms, lowering mortality rates dramatically and — so goes the conventional wisdom — boosting the quality of life for survivors.

However, it would be entirely more accurate to say that survivors of breast cancer and other forms of the disease which are more highly responsive to treatment than was once the case now have the potential to enjoy improved qualities of life.

It’s certainly not a given because the reality is there are a variety of tangible and intangible costs — financial as well as physical — that cancer survivors have to contend with.

These costs are not always well understood by employers, insurers, doctors and even the patients themselves.

“Cancer survivors face many challenges with medical care follow-up, managing the long-term and late effects of treatments, monitoring for recurrence, and an increased risk for additional cancers,” the US Centres for Disease Control said last year in a report on the hidden costs of recovery.

“These survivors also face economic challenges, including limitations in work and daily activities, obtaining health insurance coverage and accessing health care, and increasing medical care costs.

The results indicate that the economic burden of cancer survivorship is substantial among all survivors.”

Ultimately, the CDC said, its findings “suggest the need to develop and evaluate health and employment intervention programmes aimed at improving outcomes for cancer survivors and their families.”

Again, what is true in the US will also apply in Bermuda.

An increasingly large population is attempting to come to terms with all of the financial and physical issues associated with life after cancer on the Island.

There are certainly any number of individuals and organisations which assist Bermuda cancer survivors with both the physical challenges they face, as well as what the CDC calls “psychosocial” issues, such as anxiety and employment and financial worries.

But there is no comprehensive, coordinated approach in place and Bermuda might do well to look to some of the strategies being implemented in other jurisdictions.

In many American States, for instance, hospitals are creating dedicated survivor clinics which, as one South Carolina oncologist recently said, “allows both the [health care] provider and the patient a better environment to address some of these things that go beyond the question of, ‘is your cancer back or not?’.”

It’s an expensive option to consider, to be sure, particularly at a time when serious questions are being raised about the long-term viability of our existing healthcare system.

But it’s the type of practical resource which will become increasingly necessary as the number of cancer survivors in Bermuda grows — and the need to help them fight back becomes ever more acute.