Francesca,

It's terribly hard to see someone you love go through this experience. I was starting radiation treatments right around the time of our 15th wedding anniversary, and my husband had become accustomed to me as a fairly soft-spoken person. By about the halfway point in radiation, I was practically screaming my lungs out night after night because of the pain. I was angry about not being able to eat properly and about the frustration of constantly having to fight off infections. Fortunately, my husband was able to see that when I was venting I was just looking for whatever help and support he could give me.

Regarding your husband's plan to "do all the things he's never done" -- I definitely found myself thinking that way after treatment. Both my husband and I had become used to a workaholic routine: long hours at the office 6 days a week, forfeiting vacation time because we were "too busy" to take it, etc. Once I had recovered sufficiently to reassess how I was spending my time, I was able to cut my workload to a more reasonable level, and my husband and I consciously began to make more time to travel and enjoy outdoor activities. There were a number of things that I had planned to save "for retirement", but when I thought about the fact that I might not live that long, I started to do them earlier -- getting involved in volunteer work, learning to play the pipe organ, getting into gardening and orchid growing. As many people on this forum have said, going through the cancer experience usually leaves you with a sense of a "new normal", and in my case I have to say that the new normal is much better in many ways than the old one.

I hope your husband continues to see signs of recovery and that it helps to improve his outlook.

Cathy