Relationships and Cancer

Relationship and cancer. Relationship with cancer. Relationship when you know your heart will be broken--but not before it is healed and opened wide. Take a look at this relationship and cancer story from today's New York Times.


http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/05/16/health/100000000821590/love-endures-all-even-cancer.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=thab1

Save the Date: Sex and Cancer

There are a lot of things to feel squeamish about with cancer. But sex isn’t—or shouldn’t be—one of them. So here is a chance to listen, learn, talk and ask questions about sex and cancer. Mark your calendar:

Monday June 13th --7 pm to 9 pm

at The American Cancer Society Hope Club (formerly Gilda’s Club)

One Penny Lane—off Wade Road—off exit 6 of Route 87 Latham, New York

There will be a panel presentation and open discussion about the anatomy, physiology, chemistry, etiquette, hope, fear and what real people really do when making love in the time of cancer. I will be part of the panel along with other experts on cancer, caregiving and sex.

Married Illness

Here is a new and wonderful book about making a good—or decent marriage—while facing chronic illness. Called: “A Husband, A Wife & an Illness: Life Beyond Chronic Illness” written by Dr. William July and his wife, Jamey Lacy July.

They had just begun their marriage—his first and her second when a terrible auto-immune illness began to torture her. A former personal trainer and super athlete she was reduced to chronic pain, a life of medical appointments and treatments and a changed body and appearance. The blows were to her and to them. They went bankrupt, lost their dream home (her big income was gone overnight) and their lives were changed in every way. But, they write, they found a way to make a marriage in this long painful illness. It helped that Dr. July was and is a marriage and relationship counselor. But even knowing doesn’t always mean doing.

Powerful lessons from his mistakes and their almost mistakes: the well-spouse has to keep living; has to have a life apart; has to have a self. Not easy to do is it caregivers?

For many of us cancer too is a now a chronic illness. Our minds if not our lives are focused on what’s next, fear, and planning.

Here is a book that is simple, practical and very forthright about how a marriage can survive and sort of thrive in the face of all that.

For more practical wisdom go to theri website: http://www.couplesfacingillness.com/

Cancer Triangle

Now we are in-between and it is its own strange time. Making holiday plans, shopping, talking about gifts and trips and life—as if cancer is over. But is it over or only away on a trip of its own. They say that people who have cancer are never really over it. Once you know this can happen to you it’s always there hovering in the background. It’s true for caregivers too. It’s there in the background and compounded by my questions about the relationship. Will we ever have a relationship that is just us? Will there always be a triangle: me and him and cancer?

Bubbles

Last chemo yesterday. It hit me that it has been six months of chemo and cancer. At the oncology center the nurses blew bubbles and offered hugs and congratulations. When they were blowing the bubbles, nurse Felicia joked about making John dance, I felt myself shaking and swallowed back the tears that sat just below the surface. His six months yes, but mine too. Six months of short changing work, missing sleep, worrying about everything, scheduling our lives around “chemo weekends” and six months of fear. The fear is not over. Now come the CAT scans and the regular blood work to see if there is still cancer somewhere in his beautiful body.

Everyone asks, “Are you going to celebrate?” And we laugh in reply, “Oh yes, on Saturday when the infusion of FU is completed for the last time.”

Maybe someone who has been through this will understand. We came home from chemo and had a big fight. Out came all of the tension and all of the expectations that were hidden under, “If we can just get thru six months” and that now leave us with much less obvious but scarier medical steps to take. And too we are now left with the relationship, no longer hidden behind, “When chemo is over.” All of that, all that was hoped for, fantasized and deferred has burst on us just like the soap bubbles that came as congratulations.