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Love her tender
When breast cancer strikes the woman in his life, a man needs a crash course in caregiving
He was also thinking how frightened he was. And he didn't let that out either. "I thought it would have been selfish to tell her how scared I was when she was trying to deal with this disease."
Inner fears. He finally let some of those feelings out 18 months after Toya's diagnosis, when he went to a training session for a telephone help line for cancer patients. "I just opened up and talked about how I was scared. It was terrific."
Toya wasn't so sure at first that she would have wanted to hear him confess his inner fears. "If he had told me how frightened he was, I would have told him how frightened I was, and we would have wallowed in self-pity."
But Leonard now says, "It could have been good." Good to let it all out.
And Toya thinks he might be right. "It could have been good. A relief." And it wouldn't have been a complete shock. "I knew he was scared," she admits.
Many therapists--and many couples--attest to the power of sharing. During her treatment for breast cancer, journalist Linda Ellerbee remembers sharing fears and tears with her partner, Rolfe Tessem. "Allowing yourself to be comforting and him allowing himself to be comforted," she says, "brought us together in some small ways that turned out to be not so small."
Yet breast cancer is a complicated disease to treat, and the same goes for the emotional component. When it comes to expressing your feelings, "I think it totally depends," says Maryland psychologist Venus Masselam. The man's uncensored, dark emotions might be more than the wife can handle in the early days after diagnosis. "I'm not suggesting that men should never disclose. And I think you have to play it by ear. If a man has to say it, he has to say it. But it's almost as though by withholding his feelings initially, he's giving his wife the space to have her own feelings."
If everyone is going around saying how scared they are, she adds, "I don't know where one does muster a sense of hope." Maybe that's why a lot of breast cancer husbands do their crying in the car--where it seems as if no one can see them. I remember when I broke down and sobbed, listening to Ray Charles sing "America the Beautiful" while running a few errands. It was shortly after my wife's diagnosis. I thought I must be crazy--until I met other men who shed tears on the road.
One place a husband can make a tremendous difference is in the doctor's office--not as the take-charge guy but as the support person. "Having the husband--or another close friend or family member--can make the woman feel more confident and ready and willing to ask questions," says radiation oncologist Marisa Weiss, president of breastcancer.org. The ideal boss tells a supportive husband to take as much time as he needs. But some employers really do make it damned difficult for the husband. Richard Robert, who is a federal law enforcement agent, had over 700 hours of sick leave--more than enough to take his wife, Suzanne, to all her appointments. And Robert didn't want to miss out. "I just didn't want her to be by herself, getting bad news. I wanted to be there to listen, to be able to help her make decisions, to gather information, to see and to hear, like a copilot."
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