It’s A Family Affair

It’s A Family Affair

We have a saying in our oncology office: when one person in a family has cancer, it’s as if the whole family has cancer.

This cancer diagnosis will permeate your home and affect everyone who lives there and those closest to you, wherever they live. And if you have children in your home, the ripple effect may be especially pronounced.

I remember feeling really guilty that my diagnosis was making everyone so sad. I could hardly stand the pained look on my mother’s face as she watched me, her firstborn, having to deal with such a precarious prognosis. And my poor husband . . . I felt terrible for him. He already had watched his first wife die a slow, debilitating death from Lou Gehrig’s disease when she was just twenty-three. My diagnosis was his worst nightmare revisited.

Every time we got bad news and every time he had to take care of something for me, I said, “I’m sorry.” It upset me terribly that what was happening to me filled him with worry and piled on extra work because I was too ill to take care of the house and the girls the way I normally did. So I kept apologizing.

I apologized so much that he firmly told me one day, “You keep saying you’re sorry—don’t do that anymore.” To which I automatically replied, “I’m sorry.”

I honestly feel that many days it was harder for my husband to be the one without cancer than it was for me to be the one with cancer. At least I could feel I was doing something to fight the cancer as I watched chemo drip into my veins or popped chemo pills into my mouth. My husband, like many caregivers, often felt he was helplessly standing by, unable to do anything about my situation.

As I meet with newly diagnosed patients in my office each week, I often can sense that the patient is handling the diagnosis better than the spouse or adult children are.

One friend diagnosed with cancer in her early sixties told me that her husband literally ran out of the room when the doctor told them it was cancer.

“His mother died of cancer, and I know it was really hard for him,” my friend explains. “When he came back in the room, he never said a word about it.”

Sometimes patients are in such a fog they don’t really respond much to the initial diagnosis, but family members feel its weight fully.

My journalist friend Mike says his wife’s reaction to his colon cancer diagnosis at age thirty-five was very different from his.

“She was scared and upset; I was calm and reserved because I had no idea of the impending doom,” Mike recalls. “The night of the diagnosis we argued because she didn’t understand why I wasn’t more upset and I didn’t understand why she was so upset. It was a really difficult time for both of us.”

Mike’s experience is not at all unusual. We tend to marry our “opposites,” and when it comes time to deal with a cancer diagnosis, we often have opposite ways of handling the situation. Often one partner “feels” more and the other “thinks” more.

My friend Ken, diagnosed with tongue cancer in 2002, says he and his wife had similar initial responses, but then “she took a different approach to the shocking news.”

“I wanted to curl up in a ball and pretend it was a huge mistake,” Ken recalls. “She wanted to know everything she could about the disease and the treatments available, so she went on the Internet, made phone calls, and did research.”

It has been my observation after meeting literally thousands of newly diagnosed cancer patients that people tend to cope with cancer the same way they cope with life, and there’s not a lot other family members can do to change that. And while there certainly are healthy and unhealthy ways of coping, there isn’t just one right way to cope with a cancer diagnosis. Just because someone in your family sees things differently doesn’t mean necessarily that one of you is wrong and one is right.

Thank God today for the people He has placed in your life to help you with your cancer journey. It’s important that even though each of you has a different personality and coping style, you come together as one in your cancer journey. Remember, your fight is against cancer . . . not each other.

So my prayer for you today is from Ephesians 4:31-32:

Get rid of all bitterness, rage, anger, harsh words, and slander, as well as all types of evil behavior. Instead, be kind to each other, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, just as God through Christ has forgiven you. In the name of Jesus. Amen.