For Alex and I the irritability/anger was driven by different things.

For me it was time and stupidity. I did not feel I had the time to wait for others to catch up with the programme and if they delayed what I knew had to be done I didn't muck about being polite. Bureaucracy drove me insane as their processes delayed what clearly needed to be done and I could not abide "but that's the way we always do it" response. I remember being told that payment of sickness benefits would take 12 weeks to review and if I wasn't happy with whatever the outcome was, I could then write to the ombudsman. When I told them that I would not wait such a ridiculous length of time and would just go directly to the ombudsman for a ruling, they got quite agitated. But they processed the paperwork whilst I waited and Alex received his payment plus backpay (we had already waited 2 months for them to get their act into gear) the following week.

For Alex, I am sure there was a fear component but the biggest issue was confusion and short term memory loss brought on by the chemo. He was often incapable of joining the dots, leading to confusion which manifested as "brain snap". As dementia often presents as "irritability" I wondered if a similar mechanism was affecting Alex.

Regardless of the cause, I think the most important thing that helped was knowing what we were going through was normal or at least common. Reassurance from this forum went a long way towards helping us manage the situation (although I still fantasized about dropping Alex off by the side of the road on occasion )