Step Cancer

I am not alone. One of my worry what-if’s has to do with the fear of John’s cancer returning (Is it correct to say it’s gone? In remission? Hibernating? Officially you can’t say cured until five years but with colon cancer five years is half a miracle.) But with that recurrence a fear that I have is how that will play out with his kids. They opted to not be part of his life during the first year of cancer—they missed the surgery, recovery, recuperation, chemo, the pump and the ugly side effects and the skin, hair, feet, mouth, sleepless nights.

Now they are slowly—ever so slowly --returning to his life so if cancer comes back what role will they play? That little nagging bonus fear has given me some great hours of useless distraction. But shame being what it is I hardly wanted to admit I was having anticipatory resentments. But whoa—life lesson learned again: no one is ever the only one who has an experience!

In the Winter 2009 issue of CURE magazine there is an article called: “Uncertain Obligations: When Adult Children Care for Parents and Step Parents Who are Ill.” And there it is. Questions of divorce and blended families and how cancer and chemo become the acid test—the chemo test maybe?—of how successfully a family has blended –or not.

The author, Jo Cavill, writes about adult children reluctant to care for a natural parent because of divorce, unwilling to care for a step parent, the stress and strain between adult children and a new spouse sharing caregiving and the fights about both being the caregiver and not wanting to be the caregiver, and the supplementary issues raised by divorce and cancer: who makes medical decisions, how is money spent and who gets the money—if there is any left after cancer treatments—after the parent dies.

This is one of the best pieces that CURE has offered. It’s right in there describing real life and the scary realities of Love in the Time of Cancer.