Im sure you feel so relieved having discussions with your husband about your cancer. Ive often heard patients and caregivers say cancer has brought them much closer with their spouse.

You are sooo organized!!!! Thats GREAT!!! Im sure this will be a huge help to both your husband and mother down the road. I especially love how you and your husband are spending quality time together making for some great memories you both will be able to look back on and view your cancer experience in a much more positive light.

In the US, many patients who are first going home after a major surgery are able to have a visiting nurse check in on them. Ive used this service myself and found it very helpful and reassuring knowing the nurse would catch anything that was serious enough to warrant a visit to the doctor. The nurse would check and redress my healing wounds and make sure nothing was getting infected. They checked my blood pressure, the picc line, the stitches, feeding tube, etc and although their visits were only anywhere from 15 minutes to a half hour, the visits helped me mentally handle my very long, slow recovery. Maybe thats another option you would want to ask about. Its great you have your post surgery well planned out!!!

Another tip that my son (at 19 who was my caregiver) found to make things much easier for him was to put one person in charge of being the one to notify everyone. This made it so he was not overwhelmed with calls, texts, emails about my condition every single day 24/7. My son passed along every change both good and bad to my friend, who in turn was who everyone would check in with for updates. Just from my couple years on OCF, I had friends from all over the world checking up on me. This can be overwhelming to caregivers who already are stressed enough about their patients condition and worrying about what comes next. This could be something one of your friends takes on where the only person your husband or mother need to pass updates to (besides each other) would be the one person you chose to be everyones point of contact.

One thing I found so encouraging was when I finally was awakened from my medically induced coma after 3 weeks to a big stack of get well cards and wishes from everyone all over the world. I was in very bad shape and not able to focus enough to even read the cards. My son would sit there and read each card to me on a daily basis. Those cards were very special to me when I was at one of my lowest points in my life. I still have that stack of several hundred cards today almost 10 years later! My hospital has a service where anyone could put together a free online card that was printed out and delivered to my room just like how the mail-person delivers the daily mail. Theres been a few others here who have used similar hospital services to send get well wishes. Maybe your facility offers this too?