A supremely kind spouse
When Sandra Day O'Connor was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1988, she was stunned by the news. "I was unprepared for the emotional jolt," she says. "My face, my whole body tightened. It couldn't be true. I felt fine." Then reality set in--and she couldn't believe she had to make treatment decisions so quickly. "I thought if I was sick, the doctor would say what ought to be done, and that would be the end of it. Right? Wrong. You have to look into this whole business of what should be done--lumpectomy, mastectomy, radiation, chemotherapy. I was quite unprepared to make so many choices." She had oral arguments to hear; she thought she might have a couple of months to mull things over. "I was told this was not an option. I lacked an appreciation that everything had to stop and I had to focus on my health problem."
Ears. Only she found she couldn't focus. "I needed ears other than my own," she says. "I was so emotionally involved. I wasn't sure I was hearing everything."
O'Connor asked her husband, John, to come to her doctor's appointments--so he could take notes and listen carefully to what the doctors had to say. "The person with cancer doesn't hear things totally or objectively," she says. "His help was terribly important."
He continued to be her support as she underwent a mastectomy and during her months of chemo, taking her to appointments and driving her home afterward when she was feeling shaky. He was kind, caring, and tolerant. "I mean, the person with cancer might get cranky," she says, "so [the husband] needs a high level of tolerance."
For her, the best thing of all was his "just being there." That kind of attention "strengthens every human bond," she says. "During treatment, it's so important to have support from somebody who cares. It makes an enormous difference in your capacity to deal with cancer." -Marc Silver
This story appears in the October 11, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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