The Person Beside the Patient
When someone you love has cancer, people naturally look toward the patient. How are they doing? What did the scan show? What happens next?
Those questions make sense. The patient is the one with the diagnosis, the treatment, the surgery, the side effects, the uncertainty written directly into their body. But there is usually someone standing nearby whose life is changing too.
The person beside the patient.
In our story, that person has often been Patty. She did not wake up one morning and decide to become a caregiver. She was my wife before cancer, and she remained my wife through all of it. The caregiving grew around the relationship because life required it.
The Day Everything Changed
There are moments in life that divide everything into “before” and “after.” For us, that moment came with three words:
“You have cancer.”
Looking back, we can still remember where we were. We can remember the phone call. We can remember trying to absorb information that seemed to come faster than we could process it. What we remember most, though, is …