What to expect with chemo

Hi Lake swimmer

Sorry to hear about your husband, while I could describe what happened with my wife that is probably not really helpful for you and it might be easier to try asking this question in our Testicular cancer forum though you could also just look through some of the posts there already.

The part of your question I have more relation to is dealing with your children. Our son is far to familiar with hospitals and all that cancer had to offer and we have a really good guide on here Talking to children and teenagers, Michael often surprises us with how well he copes but very much it is on the basis of a trust relationship and all the stronger for that.

<<hugs>>

Steve

Hi Lake Swimmer,

Another lake swimmer here, also with two children (8 and 6) and a husband with testicular cancer. He‘s just completed three cycles, a total of 9 weeks of treatment. (I’m in Germany and I think the standard treatment is different here - each cycle was a week‘s inpatient chemo and then two weeks at home including two outpatient days.)

Batch cooking is a great idea - it’s really hard to judge what yyour husband‘s going to want to eat, but you can’t go wrong with a well-stocked freezer. What went down really well a lot of the time with my husband when he was feeling awful was a really simple chicken broth - I’d put rice or v small pasta in and as much veg as possible. Some days that was really all he could manage. But on the whole, he mainly wanted really comforting hot stew-type meals with rice or potatoes. It really helped to have tins of that sort of thing to hand - I love cooking and usually make everything from scratch, but it made things a lot easier when he was suddenly ravenous, or when it was really hot and I didn’t want to cook for the rest of us. Make sure you’re thinking not just about what he wants and needs, but also what‘s eany for you. And be prepared for him to change his mind about foods quickly, and also to go off things he usually loves. For breakfast, mine really liked having fruit and yogurt and müsli, I think it did him a lot of good knowing he was having a healthy start to the day.

Your kids are older than mine, so I imagine you’ll explain things to them a bit differently, but the thing we felt was most important for ours to know were that it’s the medicine making daddy look and feel sick, not the illness, and that once the treatment‘s over, they’ll soon get normal daddy back. Also that they can ask either of us questions whenever they need to. We didn’t use the words cancer or chemo at all when we explained it to them as we didn’t want kids coming up to them and saying things that would upset them at school, but if they’d found out and heard stories from other children, I’d have listed grannie and grandad and my SIL and all the other people they know who‘ve had cancer aand are fine. My kids have definitely got much clingier with me over the last nine weeks, but they‘ve dealt with the whole thing remarkably well all things considered. The only thing that really upset either of them was my daughter (6) and daddy‘s hair coming off. We talked about it loads in advance, but she found that really difficult.

This post has gone on so long I can’t scroll up to see what else you asked, but it’s also late here, so I’ll post this and reply again tomorrow. I hope this is helpful - please let me know if you have other questions, I’m very happy to answer them.