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Love her tender
When breast cancer strikes the woman in his life, a man needs a crash course in caregiving
That may sound glib, but there's no better advice. "It's not about you, ya bastard," says Sherwin Nuland with a wink. He's a clinical professor of surgery at Yale University and author of the award-winning book How We Die. "It's not about how sensitive or strong you can be." It's about figuring out what your wife needs from you. And sometimes, what she needs most is a sympathetic ear.
Only it turns out that listening isn't always easy. University of California-Los Angeles psychologist Annette Stanton has conducted studies that might be instructive for tin-eared husbands. Sixty breast cancer patients in the post-treatment phase participated. They all wrote about their experience with cancer, but with different aims. Members of one group recorded their deepest thoughts about the disease. The second group recorded positive changes in their lives that resulted from the diagnosis. The third group just wrote down facts about the disease.
Of the three groups, the writers who let out all their emotions made fewer visits to the doctor to report fatigue, arm swelling, and other side effects from treatment. They were also less worried about recurrence. Perhaps the women who wrote about their emotions got the worrying out of their system, Stanton speculates, and didn't feel the need to go to the doctor as much for reassurance.
If the wife is not inclined to write, Stanton suggests, a husband can make himself available to listen. "Sometimes you just have a really bad day with cancer," she explains. "To provide a receptive listening ear, and to sometimes share with your wife that 'yeah, this is really awful today' is useful."
The husband, meanwhile, may feel isolated no matter what. Society has conditioned men not to let feelings overwhelm them. And even a man accustomed to sharing his feelings with his wife may feel compelled to button up. Consider the story of Leonard Thomas. Eleven years ago, his wife, Toya, was diagnosed with breast cancer a few months past her 40th birthday. She'd found a lump while doing her monthly breast self-exam and went in for a biopsy. Two days later, the doctor called her at home. "Are you alone, or is Leonard there?" the doc asked. "That's when he told us that we had breast cancer," Toya says.
I asked her why she said "we" when she was the patient, and she replied: "Because we had breast cancer. We share everything." The two of them sat up all night after that shattering phone call, cuddled in a chair in their bedroom. They held each other and cried. They were as close as two people could be. Except for one thing.
Leonard didn't divulge his deepest feelings.
Instead, he kept them inside. When the doctor hung up, Leonard's mind ran through a million thoughts. "All I'm thinking is, I'm going to be a widower, my best friend's going to die; I'm going to have to go through this whole dating thing again. All these selfish things. Every selfish thing you can think of, I'm thinking."
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