Husband and wife have cancer at same time

Thank you so much !!

Flo1

So sorry you had to go through that. cancet is such a difficult thing to go through but even more so when it is both spouses at the same time. I still feel shocked by what my husband and I went through.

Good luck to you and your husband.

Hi Chenning

I am so sorry to hear of your husbands recent diagnosis. It is always a shock when someone is diagnosed with cancer but particularly when it is both you and your spouse.

I was diagnosed with stage 1b breast cancer in January 2013 and two months later in March 2013, my husband was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer. He was sick for many months before his diagnosis but unfortunately he also had diverticulitis and it was masking the colon cancer. It was not found until he finally had a colonoscopy. When they did the colon resection they took out his liver and found an 8 mm spot on it which put him at stage four. Initially they were going to remove part of the lobe of his liver that had the spot on it but after checking on it after a couple of rounds of chemo it could not be detected on a scan. He went through 12 rounds of chemotherapy and since then has had about ten CT scans and all of them have been clear. He had one in February of this year and that one was also clear. He also receives blood tests every three months to check his CEA levels and those have always been normal. His oncologist has told us that if he can go one more year with clean scans then he will be considered cancer free. He is a very unique case as normally after chemo is done the cancer that has metastasized will continue to spread but in his case it did not. The other thing that is unique about his case is that he only had two lymph nodes involved. We were told that normally when the cancer has metastasized like his, it has many more lymph nodes involved. The oncologist feels it was just a single cell that managed to sneak through and attach to his liver. Between scooping some of the tumour out to biopsy and with it only being 8 mm and then having chemo , they feel that this may be one of those unique cases in which the spread of the cancer was stopped by doing that only and not having to have part of his liver removed.

It was very difficult to tell the kids about my diagnosis but then two months later to have to tell them that their dad also had cancer was even harder. . Going through chemo at the same time was also very hard because we had no family near us and it was really important for us to make sure that the kids knew they could still be well taken care of even though we weren't feeling great.

We were just very positive with the kids and told them the truth, but we also told them that we were going to do everything we could to make sure we were able to beat this and be there for them. At the time the kids were only 10 and 14 and now they are 14 and 18. One of the things that was very important for us to do was to be very honest with them and let them know test results and different things that were going on with the cancer. Of course this was all done in a very age-appropriate way but there was no lying or being sneaky about things.

I had a friend who had breast cancer and she decided to not take any treatments for it and ended up passing away. One of the most unfortunate thing she did was to never be honest with her kids about the fact that she had cancer and when she passed away the kids were terribly shocked.

My older son handled things much better as he is very black-and-white but my younger son was much more affected emotionally by us going through this. He would ask me questions about where he would go and live if his dad and I both passed away and continued to ask me questions like this for a couple years after we finished treatment. I would just answer him honestly. I would tell him that we had made arrangements for that but that his dad and I were doing everything we could to make sure that that never happened. I just kept reassuring him.

If you would like, you can send me a private message and I would be happy to send you my email and we can communicate and I can answer any questions that you may have about this or just be there for support.

I wish the very best to you and your husband and even though this is a very difficult thing for you to go through I hope that you will have some reassurance in my story and knowthat you can get through it.

chenning , I sent you a message.

Mustlovepoodles , what a terrible thing to go through but I am happy for you that you husband is doing well.