Supporting a Wife with Breast Cancer – Top Tips for Husbands

Following on from my last post looking at how breast cancer affects husbands or partners, here are John InDelicato and Dave Balch’s top tips:

John’s list of recommendations:

• Be honest and open about your feelings.
• Accept the help of family and friends. You may be providing them with an opportunity to fulfil their need to help.
• Include children in conversations and encourage dialogue with them to dispel fears, misinformation, and mysteries.
• Reconstruction brings closure and wholeness.
• It’s okay to be broken.
• Realize and come to terms with what is unimagineable. Men may not experience breast surgery, chemo, and radiation.
• Learn to listen.

Dave’s list of recommendations (“The 11 L’s of Caring and Coping” © 2009, Dave Balch All rights reserved):

1. Learn as much as you can. Even if what you learn is scary, it’s better to know than not to know.
2. Level with each other. Sharing your fears helps reduce them.
3. Laugh. Nothing changes… but you feel better!
4. Live in the moment. Focus on things you can control, not things you can’t.
   Remember this phrase: “Don’t go there ‘til you get there.”
5. Look forward to something to remind you that your crisis won’t last forever, even if it seems like it will.
6. Keep friends and family in the Loop. It’s important but stressful to keep everyone up-to-date. Reduce that stress by using our free online services at: http://www.ThePatientPartnerProject.org
7. Let people help you, but only with things that you need.
8. Limit yourself to one crisis at a time. You can’t solve all problems at once, so focus on only one problem at a time.
9. Lift your spirits by taking time for yourself. Remember what they say on the airlines:
   “Put on your own oxygen mask before helping others with theirs”
10. Lower the bar. Give yourself a break: do less than you normally do until things are better.
11. Lose people that upset you. Avoid well-meaning people who try to help but make things harder instead.
12. Remember that things seem worse Late at night, when you’re tired. Be aware of that; then it’s easier to ignore the additional stress.