Thank you for this site.  We are about to enter our 38th month in the battle of breast cancer.  Like many of you reading this I had heard of breast cancer, my mother is a survivor herself, but I had NO IDEA of what it is like until it was my beloved Ruthann who is in this situation.  The toll on her and the toll on us rings up every emotion from the deepest of places that God gave us.  The good thing is that like brussel sprouts, you learn to see things differently.  We have been blessed in that Ruthann is well at 38 months in and I wasn't so sure that we would be here when we started this road.  Her best friend had lost her own battle to breast cancer just two years before Ruthann got her own diagnosis.  

What I want to share with anyone who reads this is a sense of hope.  Never give up.  Keep on learning everything you can, especially from other husbands who have been on the road.  There are limited resources for men to turn to.  To this day I appreciate Marc Silver and the book he wrote which was published just at our darkest hour.  I have donated copies of this book to the hospital library and need to do this for our church library.  I also had the good fortune to be mentored by an executive at the company I worked for who started his own path as husband / caregiver just three years before we did.  I can't say enough about other women I met who shared their own stories about what worked and what didn't work as their husbands struggled with the same events and feelings.  

You see, I work for a hospital in the information services department.  The hospital had started to concentrate on building a breast center of excellence several years before Ruthann was diagnosed.  I sure had no idea that one day the relationships forged at that time and resources created from that project would play such a personal part in our own lives.  Not that I am saying God has a sense of humor or a sense of knowing what we need in our lives, but I sure have to wonder about that.

This is not a cold.  I keep thinking that the next event is the one that will get this put into the history bank of our 33 married years.  By now, like it or not, I have come to accept that this is something that is going to last the rest of our life together in one form or another.  The trick is to get the most out of the "companionship" we have from breast cancer.  There are days when we are successful at this and those that we are not.  

We have spent two of our last three anniversaries on good old 4 East at the hospital recovering from surgeries.  I love those people up there.  Everytime we upgraded a computer system at the hospital, I made sure that those wonderful people had every tool they needed to implement the systems comfortably so they could do their jobs better for the next one through.  I find that "for the next one through" is an important concept.  I have had the opportunity to speak about this at hospital meetings; the concept of caring about the next one through has proved to be something very important to my own internal process in dealing with this.  

While medications are improving all the time, so is the technology that physicians and hospitals have at hand.  Electronic health records are slowly but surely coming into their own.  Physicians and patients will have faster and more accurate access to everything from test results to progress notes.  Medications are checked to make sure that dangerous combinations or doses are not inadvertently administered.  Patient safety is getting better all the time.  One research oncologist told us that the next great break throughs in cancer treatment may well be information technology driven.  It is all about hope for you the caregiver and your loved one.  Diet, medications, people interacting with you, God's love, the power of prayer, and technology are all pieces in the puzzle of hope.  The weirdest things can look differently anymore.  A steamed brussel sprout smells like a winner to me now.  Who would have ever thought...