Episode 047: Cancer Caregiver’s Journey
Jan 17, 2019•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast Episode description
Look, I know that supporting someone you love through cancer can really be the toughest job in the world. Not only do you have to support them through it, but you somehow have to try to find a way to deal with all the craziness and the uncertainty yourself. Today, we get to hear what it’s like to be a caregiver from Honore, who went on this extraordinary adventure of supporting her husband through cancer. Here are some things that we cover today:
The shock of cancer diagnosis in your 20s
The tough challenge of switching roles as a caregiver
Top advice on keeping life and treatment apart
How to deal with stress and uncertainty when your partner has cancer
The importance of keeping to new rituals
and much, much more!
Links
128 Days & Counting: Website and Blog
128 Days & Counting on Amazon
128 Days & Counting on Goodreads
Episode 015: When Your Loved One Has Cancer
Full Transcript
Joe: What was your life like before cancer?
Honore: Life before cancer feels really simple now. My husband and I, Tom, we were married three years. We had been together just over six. We were in our late 20s, establishing our careers and enjoying the opportunities of travel. We were at that age where every weekend was a wedding or a bachelor party or a bachelorette party. We were just in that time in our lives where we were constantly moving and really got to enjoy those first couple of years of marriage. Things were great. It came so abruptly that that time in our life just seems foreign now.
Joe: Absolutely. How did you first find out that Tom had cancer?
Honore: We were actually very fortunate. Tom was having a weird cough and some pain in his chest. He didn’t really think anything of it. I remember him coming up the stairs that night and just making a face a little bit and pushing on his chest. He said something just felt weird. We thought, okay, a cold is coming or something like that. It’s September, all the back-to-school stuff and we went to sleep that night and about five o’clock the next morning, I woke up and he was putting clothes on and he was getting ready. He said he needed to go to the hospital. Fast-forward an hour or so later, and he had an x-ray and they saw a shadow in the mediastinal, so in his chest.
From that, they sent him to a CT and there was a baseball-sized tumour sitting in the centre of his chest, essentially, in the mediastinal. What was causing that chest pain for him was the fact that the tumour was touching his heart. We were actually in a way very fortunate because it mimicked symptoms that you don’t mess around with. You go into the ER when you’re having chest pain like that.
Where some people who had gotten this type of cancer in their abdomen and it takes longer to diagnose because you just think you’re having a food allergy or something like that. We were very fortunate in a way that it was in his chest. We got to the hospital a little bit 6:00am, by three o’clock that afternoon, we knew it was a late stage-three cancer. His particular cancer was a non-seminoma germ cell tumour, which is a rare form of testicular cancer.
Joe: Yes, wow, it’s just such a shock, isn’t it, because you just never see it coming. What was the first thing that went through your mind?
Honore: That I would wake up. It’s funny because naively, in a way I woke up out of a dead sleep to Tom saying, “We need to go to the hospital.” There’s an element of that that I honest to goodness thought I was in a dream. I would wake up, it would be okay, I would wake up, this is just one of those really vivid dreams you have. Unfortunately, not. Once I accepted that reality in that day anyway, I think it took long to truly accept our reality, but knowing that I wasn’t in a dream, unfortunately, what you think of is every bad story you’ve ever heard about cancer and the financial impact it...
