Managing Transportation | Families as Nurses | Help With the Household | Downsides of Help | Keep It Flexible
Introduction
Most of us see our homes as a refuge from the stresses of the outside world. When your spouse or another family member has cancer, your entire family life changes. You soon learn, as primary caregiver, that many factors are not under your control. Middle of the night emergency visits to the hospital or daily trips for radiation or chemotherapy treatments can wreak havoc on your home and work schedules. In addition, your kids still need to see the dentist, still get sick occasionally, and still want to (and should) participate in school and sports activities.
How can you manage the jobs of caregiving, parenting and working without experiencing burnout? Experts agree that the primary caregiver, to be effective, must learn to function as a team member. And yet, the necessity to ask for and accept help can put women in a bind, especially those who take pride in their independence, notes oncology social worker and Director of Clinical Services for CancerCare, Les Gallo-Silver.
"Reaching out for help is probably the hardest thing that anyone does," says Dr. Gallo-Silver. "We don't come from a culture that sees [asking for help] as a norm - we come from a culture that is very autonomous, very individually-driven. For a lot of people, taking care of a person with cancer presents them with the need to ask for help, even though it's not comfortable."
Dr. Gallo-Silver and his colleagues at CancerCare, Inc. (a support organization for those with cancer and their caregivers) encourage their clients to re-frame their notions of independence versus dependence. "Interdependence - where people do function independently, but they also function as a group - is actually the model for an effective family unit," he says. In this section, you'll learn how asking for and accepting support - from both within and outside the family - can make a difference in your ability to more effectively manage your caregiving tasks.
