This is a true story, an adventure, a journey, whatever you wish to call it, of my experience caring for my husband, Dave, when he was diagnosed with (MM), a rare blood cancer (1% of all cancers, 14% of the three blood cancers – Leukemia, Lymphoma, Myeloma).
I also cared for my mother, Chris, who had five cancers over a 15 year period. She licked four of them resoundingly, only to succumb to the last one which had gotten into her liver.
I also cared for, on and off, my father’s parents, Otis and Ruth Hudson, and I supported my Mom when she was caring for her father, Robert McCoy. All of them lived very healthily, well into their 90’s.
Lucky for Dave and me, I had had some experience with basic caregiving, though I did not have the emotional experience of caring for someone so young, stricken so suddenly – out of no where, with this debilitating, life threatening, cancer in the prime of his life, and on whose survival I depended. Dave is my husband, he is the breadwinner of our family, our survival is not mutually exclusive. We have a home, bills, obligations, children in college, plans – Dammit! He was 48 at the time of diagnosis. We celebrated our 27th wedding anniversary eight days after his diagnosis, with a simple “Happy Anniversary…”. Nothing more. For us, at that moment, it was just another day to get through.
Caring for my mother and grandparents was quite different than this. My mother needed little care through her cancers until the last one and then she was terminal. So while it was intense and emotional, it was very finite. Make no mistake, my life was thrown upside down, but it is a very different mind set than someone who is going to aggressively and vigorously fight cancer in an effort to prolong their life, and if lucky, really lucky, save their life. My grandparents, were elderly, had an incredible life, and just needed some help in their final days. I was not their primary caregiver, but hopefully, a helpful hand to my Aunt June, their daughter. Also a really big difference was that my Mom was fine and then had a slow decline. Dave was knocked on his proverbial ASS overnight! I mean, he was driving to and from work the day before and then BOOM, he can barely move or get out of bed, is on enough pain killers to knock down a herd of horses, and we are trying to get him from that, to being able to get up and go to the bathroom on his own in 30 minutes or less! It was SHOCKING.
Everyone has a story, ours begins here. My hope is that someone out there, finds a kindred spirit in the words here. I hope that you are validated, enlightened, enriched, energized, encouraged and uplifted on your own brave journey as well as that of your loved one. A caregiver’s journey is not the same as the patient. Its not the same as the rest of the family’s. It is very distinct.
I often said to others when I felt sorry for myself, “this is ‘happening TO Dave’, but the truth is, it is happening to me too, just not in the same way.”
