Everyone is coughing everywhere...

Dear CarerBowelCancer

Welcome to our online community. Thank you for getting in touch with us.

I am sorry to hear that your partner is going through chemotherapy and that you are not feeling well. It can be hard looking after someone with cancer and here are some practical tips for caring for someone with cancer.

As a support line service, we are always happy to support with generalised cancer information, signposting to services and for emotional support. However, we do not access to NHS records or face to face staff to be able to offer individual assessment.

In answer to your question, this isn’t strictly necessary that you need to move into a hotel.

It isn’t always an option for people to sleep in separate rooms or go to a hotel. If you do want to move into a hotel if you are unwell, and this is something that you and your partner feel would be best then that is something you could consider.

Sometimes single parents have children that are unwell and still need to look after them, so this isn’t strictly necessary. We can only try and protect them as the best of our ability.

What is important, is that you take the precautions that you can, such as good hygiene, using separate towels etc and if you want to use a mask then you can.

We would also advise you to speak to your partners treatment team at the hospital as all chemotherapy can be different, have different risks, and at different times during the chemotherapy cycle. So they might be able to give you more specific advice.

Here is some information on infection which also goes into more details about tips for avoiding infection.

The most important thing is if your partner shows any sign of an infection they contact their 24hr chemotherapy helpline and not to avoid delaying this.

Here is some information about supporting your partner which you might find helpful. There is also our carers only forum which you might find beneficial too.

I hope this information is useful CarerBowelCancer. Please do come back to us if there is anything further that we can help with.

Ref GMcR/JH

Gina – Cancer Information Nurse Specialist