As a caregiver there are going to be many moments when it feels as if you couldn’t bear to face one more day, one more piece of bad news, or one more setback in your loved one’s health. These feelings are not because you don’t care deeply about your loved one. It’s simply because being […]
Read MoreMost cancer caregivers think so much about their loved one that they don’t take the time to get support themselves. As a caregiver, it’s normal to experience a lot of stress. But when you do experience stress, depression or other struggles, it’s important to seek help – for the sake of your partner, and for […]
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Important Note: I am not a therapist. Nothing in this post is a substitute for professional therapy or advice. Grief can be debilitating. Hopefully, by providing you with some background on grief, what it is, and how it can affect us, it can become just a tiny bit less debilitating. The image of grief that comes […]
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The Emperor of All Maladies is not a history of cancer. It’s a biography of a monster. What Siddhartha Mukherjee conveys in The Emperor of All Maladies is that cancer is a living, breathing, adapting, and insatiable illness. Mukherjee meticulously records every human attempt to make this monster extinct, all of them failures in their ultimate goal. But […]
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It can be slightly overwhelming to deal with so many doctors and medical staff as a cancer patient or caregiver. My wife and I dealt with too many doctors to count during her cancer journey, so I did learn a few practical things that can make your doctor interactions go more smoothly. First, if you […]
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When I talk to people about the palliative care stage of Julia’s illness, they often ask me if we talked about her looming death and what would follow. The answer is yes, we did. Not surprising to those that knew her, Julia initiated most of these conversations. Often, what she brought up was how she […]
Read MoreOne of the best ways to support your loved one with cancer is to educate yourself about cancer. Many well-meaning people will tell you many “facts” about cancer and give you advice based on these “facts”. You need to know enough about the disease to separate fact from fiction in these interactions. Let me be […]
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Support groups are a great way to meet with others going through a similar situation. These groups are a safe place to share your struggles, and discuss ideas of how to journey through cancer. These resources are for people who have cancer. I have another post with support group resources for spouses, partners or caregivers of people […]
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