Facing Serious Illnesses

When Life Becomes Precious: The Essential Guide for Patients, Loved Ones, and Friends of Those Facing Serious Illnesses
by Elise Babcock

When you hear that someone you love has cancer...
You want to be as supportive as possible. But how?

Elise NeeDell Babcock has devoted her life to answering this question and now puts her twenty-three years of experience as a counselor into this immensely useful guide. When Life Becomes Precious contains hundreds of tips for helping patients, primary caregivers, co-workers, and family members, including:

What to say (and not to say) to someone when you first find out they have cancer

• How to be supportive without being intrusive
• How to build a winning health-care team
• How to handle holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries
• How to explain the disease to children
• Which gifts and gestures can do the most good

From techniques for handling anger and anxiety, to uplifting success stories, to a comprehensive resource section, here is the information and inspiration you need to help those you love and to make each day - each moment - more precious.

When Life Becomes Precious will be the first book to:

• Offer tips on ways to help patients, caregivers and co-workers
• Provide a long and diverse list of gifts that are appropriate to give to families that are living with cancer
• Offers reasons why fear makes people shy away from discussing cancer and techniques on how to overcome that fear
• Present the things that families do that doctors like and dislike

When Life Becomes Precious will teach readers to assess and put into perspective, their own feelings about the disease so that they can truly help those who are afflicted with it. The use of cartoons, anecdotes and personal stories will set an upbeat and positive tone. Readers will come away fully prepared to deal with the realities of cancer.

Kicking my office door closed, I waited, listening to my father's voice on the phone, the voice of a frightened and broken man, a sound I'd never heard before from him. Although he hadn't told me anything disturbing yet, I was terrified. Perhaps that's what happens when we go into shock. The sound of a frightened voice alerts the mind, clearing it, leaving in it only room for what is to come. Hundreds of miles away, I could hear my father calculating, regrouping, and then he spoke. "Your mother has lung cancer."

"But," I yelled, "she just told me she stopped smoking," as though that had anything to do with it. Even though I was president of a cancer agency, I was reacting as any daughter might _ reaching for anything to make his words disappear.

"We need your help. We need a second opinion." He didn't tell me then, nor did I find out until years later, but the first doctor had said her cancer was inoperable. There was no hope. My father asked me for the name of a surgeon. I started my list. He wanted books. I imagined packing them. By the end of the call, I was afraid I would lose not only my mother but also my father. They were so mingled, so entwined, each thriving on the other's identity, each filling a place the other couldn't. And after nineteen years of working with cancer patients and their families, I knew his health was as much at risk as hers.

By 1993, I'd seen so many loved ones like him. I'd talked to them, counseled them, comforted them, and yet I did not know what to say to him. Cancer had now walked into my parents' home, the home I grew up in. It had sat on the couch, crossed its arms, announced it was staying. And although I was no stranger to this intruder, since it had entered the homes of others I loved, I found it impossible to be objective when it was sitting on my couch, in my living room.

For me, involvement with the disease started in 1974, when only families were allowed to visit cancer patients. I had to sneak into the hospital to see my teenage friend Jimmy when he was first diagnosed. After that visit, I was to see him only one more time. Together, we rode around the streets of our small New Jersey town, reminiscing, planning, scheduling the dates for a visit that Jimmy would never make, a future he would never see.

The night before he died, he told a mutual friend, "Give Elise a message, tell her I said, 'Thank you.'" I'm still not sure why he said that. I suppose he knew his words would steer me in the right direction. Jimmy knew me all too well. Two months later, I was volunteering at John Runnels Hospital, in the cancer wing.

By 1981, I'd read everything I could about counseling and cancer. I found out a lot about counseling and little about the emotional aspects of cancer. I worked in nonprofit and for-profit health care agencies. I trailed after my cousin's wife, Dr. Elaine Needell, a psychiatrist at Miami Medical School. For five more years, I sat in Baylor College of Medicine's weekly cancer conferences, also taught by a psychiatrist. I watched intently as these professors interviewed cancer patients and then discussed how best to help them. I met with experts, including Dr. Jimmie Holland, chief of psychiatry at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, and Dr. Carl Simonton, author of Getting Well Again. I went to conferences with speakers such as Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. I wrote graduate papers on the psychological impact of the disease.

In 1982, with the help of many people, I started Cancer Counseling in Houston. It was the first agency in the United States to provide free professional counseling to cancer patients and their families during any stage of the disease. Well-known psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers quickly joined the staff. Fourteen of the original fifteen therapists are still with us today. In 1986, one of the staff members, Dr. Norman Decker, and I started the country's first groups for couples coping with cancer. During weekly ninety-minute sessions, six couples came together to talk about living and dying with cancer. These groups, which ran for as long as eighteen months, would change not only the members' lives but Norm's and mine as well.

By 1993, I was president of a cancer agency working primarily with couples coping with cancer. Although what I learned from these couples would help me later, it was of little help that day my father called. So I did what came easy. I found resources. I helped schedule my mother's first visit to Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York City within hours of my father's call. It was a fast-growing tumor. If it reached outside the lung, they wouldn't even treat her except to keep her comfortable. I'd seen comfortable many times. I wanted so much more.

Memorial Day weekend. My husband, Jack, and I found my mother in a standard blue hospital room at the end of a long sterile hallway. I lowered myself into an orange plastic chair, the kind that sticks to you in the summer. My parents squeezed themselves together on the raised metal bed, and Jack leaned against the window. That night before surgery, we protected each other with laughter and stories and NBA play-off predictions.

The next morning, I arrived shortly after six, just in time to see my father looking worse than my mother. A crisply dressed, stern-looking, and eventually embarrassed orderly announced himself at the door, and then sharply said to my father, "Are you ready to go now?"

As the orderly wheeled my mother down a long white corridor, I turned to my father and said, "Did you know you can go part of the way?" He shoved on his slippers and was off without a word. I watched as her fingers reached up from the gurney and wrapped themselves around his. When he returned, he whispered, "That was the hardest thing I've ever done." What I wondered was whether it was the last time her outstretched hand would ever reach for his.

Downstairs, more sticky built-in couches awaited us, symmetrically arranged around a wide-open room whose large windows faced a concrete wall and a huge willow tree. There we camped out, steps away from the gift shop filled with the right cards, the perfect words, fresh flowers, and books that were supposed to bring comfort. But for those of us waiting, there was no comfort. Suddenly it occurred to me that all the books I had recommended to clients, most of which I had given to my father, didn't tell families what they needed most. I needed an objective voice, any voice but my own, one whose words would guide me, would tell me what to say to him. My father needed the stories of others who had been where he was now, people who could give him hope, show him the way. As I returned to our stakeout, empty-handed, I vowed to write that book.

We drank too much coffee, ate very little, and said even less. We took turns watching the hallway, waiting. Finally, I reached over, turning my father's wrist, searching for his watch. My dad nodded, only glancing up for the minute it took him to meet my eyes. He went back to reading and rereading the same pages of the Times.

© 1997 by Elise Babcock