Hi Barbara, I'm just catching up with your post and wanted to answer the question on what do you do during those it's all bad moments. Caregivers and patients are both experiencing cancer from different perspectives and there is no good role to play. It's a combination of fear, guilt, and a sense that all the security we thought we had just went right down the toilet. Time literally stops in the normal sense.

Fears about will this work or will it come back are more prevelent in the beginning when everything is such a raw nerve. It's hard not to second guess the decisions we've made but we don't have the perspective on knowing that there is no universal treatment protocol, that every cancer is different and treatment protocols need to be individualized for stage, location, nature of the tumor, lymph node involvment, and general health status. It's just too soon to be comfortable that we're doing the best we can with the information we have. There's a tendency sometimes to think that everyone must have a better treatment protocol - or at least an easier one and that consumed a lot of my energy at the point you're at.

Everything felt weird to me in the beginning and there were days I was positively manic in trying to be on top of it all. It was exhausting and in hindsight, futile. Fortunately that passes over time and although it doesn't get easier, it does get more familiar and somehow we get through it. I thought that time period was never going to end but here we are on the other side of the treatment portion, still working on recovery but finding a new normal.

None of our prior professional experience prepares us for this no matter what we did before the diagnosis. Whatever our lives were before, now we're patients and caregivers. Also the timing is never good, you dealt with this on your birthday, we dealt with it on our 25th wedding anniversary when we were supposed to be in Hawaii getting remarried at sunset on the beach. There's no good time to get cancer or short cut or easy way to live through the treatments and our fears, just know that over time you will put it all in it's proper place. Remember that a bad day is just one day - there will be others. We go moment to moment, and then day to day.

I'm also in health care working in home care and hospice. Despite my 35 years working with cancer patients and caregivers I can honestly say I was not in the least prepared to be one. I believe this experience is not over for Jack and I, but we are in a better place than we were and we've rescheduled that trip to Hawaii. Visualizing yourself in that better place helps. For me it was knowing that I had a gown, a maid of honor, and pictures of a bouquet and a cake that have been waiting since last February to get used. The hotel wedding planner sent me a Hawaii calendar to hang in our bedroom so we would know what we were coming to when all ths was over. Every month, I flip the picture over and think about how we're that much closer to getting there.

Before you know it, you're getting on with your life. Find your Hawaii to get through those bad days, and ask for help when you need it.

Regards JoAnne