Helping Those Who Love You Deal with Fear
When you're diagnosed with breast cancer, everyone who loves you is affected. They can feel helpless and anxious too—you're not the only one who's scared. Dealing with your family and loved ones is part of the deal. Whether you have a spouse or partner, young children, teenagers, grown kids with families of their own, or good friends who have been through everything with you, this crisis in your life spills over to touch those you love.
After your initial shock, you may actually be better equipped to deal with what's going on than those around you. You are now learning a lot about your disease and what can be done to treat it effectively. That gives you a lot of understanding and power—two great weapons against fear. Those you love, however, may feel as if they're standing by, watching what's happening to you without being able to do anything to help. The important thing, always, is to work together and support one another as a team.
Young children, particularly, may be terrified that you are going to leave them. They may find it hard to watch you losing your hair, and they may act out in ways that don't seem to make a lot of sense. You can do a great deal to reassure them that you're the same Mom you've always been but that you may have to take things a little slower for a while.
You can also help them a lot by just being yourself. Do the routine things; act in the ways you have done in the past. Keep on giving lots of love, help them stay on track with homework and chores, encourage them to spend time with their friends, and don't let discipline fall off just because you're not feeling well. If it's hard for you to be the "tough" parent, delegate that responsibility to your partner for a while. And of course, it's important to be consistent as a team together in setting limits, expectations, and rewards.
If you have a partner, you can provide help by getting feelings out into the open. Communication, whether it's about regular household activities or about your deepest fears, is probably more important now than it's ever been before.
This doesn't mean there won't be days when you just want to be by yourself and not think about anyone else. It's important to protect your privacy and your need to be alone to take care of your feelings every once in a while. You don't have to pretend that things are perfectly fine. You can let those around you know that they haven't done anything wrong—you just need a little space right now.
No matter how hard this breast cancer journey is for you, understand that those going through it with you are also trying to make sense of their own role, and that sometimes it can seem overwhelming for them, too.
Life is filled with so many surprises and twists and turns; sometimes it's hard to remember that things have changed from the way we remember them, and that things will change again. By joining forces with your family and loved ones, you can weather these changes together.
An original video-on-demand educational initiative brought to you by Breastcancer.org and Comcast. Visit www.comcast.net/pinkribbon each week through the end of October for engaging, up-to-date videos and information about the fight to end breast cancer.