I was lucky enough to have my incredibly loving and supportive husband and mother-in-law by my side during my fight. The role of caretakers in your well-being is essential and worth addressing.

We expect our caretakers to be pillars of strength, our rocks to provide emotional and physical support. We, as the cancer patients, are physically fighting for our lives, but our caretakers face a silent struggle that can be just as emotionally draining.

It is important to recognize that their fight can be just as hard, or harder. They are expected to stand silently by our side without the a
bility to fight the cancer themselves; not to mention that their social life suffers just as much as ours. Appreciate your loved ones and the support they are graciously able to provide.

My husband and I found ways to make the weekends following chemotherapy fun — as fun as they can be when you feel tired and nauseous. Before each treatment, we would pick out movies that we wanted to watch, and board games we wanted to play. That way, we had “plans” to look forward to for the weekend. We spent all of October catching up on Alfred Hitchcock classics, and November on Woody Allen. Fun ideas like this helped us to find normalcy in our completely abnormal lives. Mixed in with the frequent family visits, our weekends actually turned out to be kind of great.