Deb,

As a former (long time ago) patient, I've been reading this thread and trying to come up with a balanced answer. Based on everything you've said about your husband's experience to this point, I'm mostly in the camp of those who say tell him to get off his butt and get on with life. I do feel some sympathy for the fact that if he's working, he may run out of energy by the time he's home. I know I was trying to hold down my job for the entire time I was going through treatment, as I was fairly sure they'd find some excuse to fire me if I took too much time off during surgery/radiation. By the end of the day, I was pretty well exhausted most of the time.

However, I also felt somewhat robbed of the vacation my husband and I had planned for the summer when I was being treated, and we were both determined to make it up in some way as soon as we could. While we couldn't exactly duplicate that trip, we were able to schedule a couple of different ones within the first few months after my radiation ended -- ones that were a real change of pace and exactly what I needed. The first one was within a couple hundred miles from home, so I felt there was a "safety net" in case I had to get back in a hurry. The second one was much farther away and included taking sailing lessons in the Caribbean -- by the time I was done with that, I felt like it really was time to move on.

Before cancer, I felt very healthy and assumed that I would live till I was past 80 -- having cancer made me realize that that might not happen, and that anything I thought was worth doing should be done sooner rather than later. It taught me some lessons about how I should organize both my work and non-work time in a much different way than I had before.

I hope your husband's psychiatrist is doing more than just prescribing medication. If your husband is physically able to do more, it sounds to me like he needs to find some level of motivation to make the most of every day.

Cathy