Cancer patients on chemotherapy experience nausea, vomiting, and fatigue among other side-effects. However, many of them don’t know how to use self-management to lessen these effects on their health. Therefore, this study assessed cancer patients' knowledge and self-management strategies for cancer and chemotherapy-induced nausea, vomiting and fatigue side-effects in two Teaching Hospitals in Lagos State, Nigeria.

A descriptive study of 222 cancer patients on chemotherapy aged 18years and older conducted in LUTH and LASUTH Oncology Clinics used purposive sampling to recruit 160 respondents. A pretested structured researcher-designed questionnaire was used to collect data with a 99.4% response rate. Descriptive and categorical statistics were used to analyse data and results were presented in tables, frequencies and percentages.

Findings showed that 34.0% of the respondents were aged 58-67years with 83.6% females and 16.4% males. 66.7% were married, 44.7% were self-employed while 32.7% were on less than N30,000 monthly income. 62.9% knew what cancer is but 23.3% termed it a tumour. Majority (64.2%) knew cancer affects all humans and 50.9% preferred chemotherapy to treat it but self-management knowledge level of 61.6% of them was low, 22.0% was average while that of 16.4% was high. Generally, their nausea self-management strategies was poor (x̄=2.25), vomiting was fair (x̄=2.5) while fatigue was good (x̄=2.87). 

Conclusively, many respondents had low knowledge of cancer self-management and poor nausea self-management strategies, hence, Oncology professionals need to enlighten cancer patients on effective cancer and chemotherapy nausea, vomiting and fatigue self-management strategies to achieve improved health.

Keywords: Cancer patient, Chemotherapy, Self-management strategies, Symptom self-management