The dark side of the Cancer Card

Zachs Heidi

I think you are spot-on with your comments re caregivers. My partner was totally tremendous throughout my recovery from RC. There was nothing too troublesome, She was right there throughout the night helping me flush drains and toweling down the curtains when I'd sprayed saline all over the room. Then right there at breakfast with the bacon and eggs and back for lunch with the chicken soup. She's an aussie and learned to drive on British roads so she could take me out into the countryside and prop me against a tree and do runs to the pharmacy. I'd do the same for her and I KNOW she made my recovery infinitely better, easier and faster. Now we are just getting on with the rest of our lives.

all the best


tim

Hi, Eileen...I just have to weigh in on this. I'm in the middle of a snit with my husband because of his bad temper yesterday. When he asked me if I was still angry, and I said yes, he hit the roof, with the Cancer Card, big time. He's been in a bad mood, and I just don't want to back down. But that's not why I wanted to chime in here.

The one thing that you may notice is that things will get messy for a while. Messy as in big piles of undone "stuff" like piles of paper, bags of medical supplies, counters full of Rx's and bottles and tubes. Messy as in cards from friends, telephone messages, unfolded clothes. Messy as in not put away the way you want them to be. And it will bother you probably more than your husband.

And it will get put away finally, probably in one big sweep, after he's down to only his stoma and a catheter. And it will feel great.

And then it will start again, with some other medical visit, and you will feel that you've made NO progress at all.

And so it goes. Just let it pile up, and when you have bigger piles, it will look better when it's clean. Like that folk tale of making the house feel bigger by bringing in lots of people.

This is a really good discussion, guys. And what do we do when the patient plays the Cancer Card and that is only to distract the discussion? He was being an ass, and feels he is entitled.

There! That felt better.

Stephany in Iowa

Rosemary, I am shocked at your revalation, no not really, but I enjoyed your story, oh what love does! At our house, 6 children, strong Catholic upbringing, my older sister got a DIVORCE, after 10 years of marriage, my mother didn't come out of her room for 2 weeks. I was younger, I use to sit by her bedroom door as I was worried about her. And I vowed I will never do anthing that would hurt my mom in that fashion. Poor thing, she cooked, washed clothes and made a wondeful home for all of us, clean smelling sheets from blowing in the wind on our beds. I was fortuneate to have such a mom and dad. She never complained. Thats Key! Ginger

I ditched a 10 year relationship when I got Dx'd with BC. It was really a no brainer, as the fella had been Dx'd with Hepatitis C about 2 years before and was doing nothing to help himself with it. The Doctor gave him 5 years to live without treatment, and he chose not to be treated. I had been periodically getting blood tests for Hep C because I seemed to be in constant contact with his blood having to clean up behind him from his bleeding ulcers.

There is no telling how much blood I cleaned up for him, and I never got Hep C, but I got cancer, so that is another thing that doesn't make sense about having a good immune system.

Anyway, I decided that I couldn't battle the war on 2 fronts, worrying about Hep C and Cancer too, and I just didn't need the worry anyway.

I still miss him, as we used to have so much fun going Cape Lookout and spending the night on the beach and playing with the dogs and growing a garden.

I went to see him last week because I still care about him and I still miss him.

Especially at this time of year.

Whew....

Rosemary

I do have a bumper sticker......"Just let me shop and noone gets hurt"...I suppose that doesn't apply huh?
I don't know..i always said i came from a broken home because my parents stayed together. I never understood their dynamics until quite late in their lives when my mother who was very compromised with heart failure and a l7% ejection fraction and i was sitting next to her on her bed and she began a diatribe about my father and the affair that he had with a much younger woman that was working for him (I happened to know about it as i was also working for the pharmaceutical company at the time and it was oh soooo obvious to everyone) and i began to sympathize with my mother and take her side to which she barked at me "How dare you talk about your father that way after all he has done for you"......In that moment i understood their love/hate relationship and not even a daughter would dare to say a bad thing about the other person...especially a daughter. Life is complicated...Life is sometimes a compromise...but somewhere in there was a deep love that comes from first love and somehow gets sidetracked but never forgotten. Pat

As I was doing some gardening today I was giving this topic some thought.

There are a lot of situations in life and business that I consider to be zero-sum. One in which you can ask yourself the question "knowing what I know now about this, would I have gotten into it in the first place?" Then you can respond appropriately. If the answer is "yes", then you move forward. If the answer is "no", then the proper response is "what do I have to do to get out of it?".

Marriage and sickness really complicate this. If a relationship is already strained and unhappy, adding cancer to the mix makes leaving--and staying--so much harder. Now there are dynamics that are overwhelming and either solution--leaving or staying--is infinitely more complex and much more difficult to explain to yourself or your family.

In the early 1990s I impulsively proposed to a woman I had known for only 28 days. Fortunately for all concerned, I got a "Dear Zach" letter while I was out of the country, and she was long gone by the time I returned. If we had married it would have been a disaster. If we married, had children, and she got cancer I don't know what I would have done. It's a scenario that I can hardly contemplate.

I have nothing but sympathy for those of us in that quandary. I don't have an answer, I don't have a t-shirt, and I don't have a bumper-sticker. As Wendy said, "This too, shall pass" is the best I can come up with, and is perhaps the best that is available.

Zach