Cancer Caregiver Roles
What You Need to Know
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None of us was fully prepared when the call came to become a Caregiver to a loved one who has contracted cancer. Cancer Caregiving is "on-the-job-learning." The common experience of those diagnosed with cancer is that they are not only devastated because they have cancer, but are also devastated financially because of the horrendous costs of treating the disease. We required medical treatments in 2009 that totaled $197,725.(p.44) divided by 52 weeks = $3,802.40 per week. That same year we underwent 116 separately billed medical interventions, (p.70) divided into 365 = a separately scheduled medical intervention every 3.2 days (normalized). For all of this, our out of pocket expenses were less than $10,000. (p.44) and everyday people need to know this! This book can help them save their home from foreclosure or their family from bankruptcy. Cancer not only generates horrific costs, it is constantly in your face. It follows one relentlessly. The implementation of the medical treatment plan falls heavily on the Family Caregiver---24/7. Not only the treatment plan, but the overall well-being and quality of life, because the patient is so caught up in the disease only her partner can rip her out of cancer's smothering vortex. Cancer kills living before it kills life. This book is my attempt to chronicle our nine year experiences with cancer, from diagnosis through death, in order to help other Family Caregivers and Patients get quick and accurate information that will help make their journey more loving and more proficient. The final chapter is on Laughter, critically important to survive this journey as long as possible. I essentially tried to compile a cancer toolbox for couples engaged in coping with this life-changing dance. John Garnand
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Book Details
About the Book
If cancer has touched your family, you need this book.
The Cancer Caregiver Roles that have to be assumed are:
1) Medical Support—including scheduling, medication support, monitoring side effects, managing pain, maintaining medical records, and advance medical directives.
2) Insurance and Financial Management—selecting the right insurance plans, or finding resources if you have no insurance, and navigating the medical quicksand of costs so as not to drown in medical bankruptcy or lose your home.
3) Household Management—including nutrition management, safety, controls for infection, modesty, and physical/emotional/spiritual support.
The final chapter of the book is on Laughter because splashes of laughter are a powerful antidote to pain, stress, and conflict. Laughter strengthens the body's immune system. Laughter pushes back the cancer for a while. The Epilogue deals with end of life.
About the Author
John Garnand has spent a lifetime as a teacher.
Most recently, John retired from the Leeds School of Business of the University of Colorado at Boulder. For twenty-one years, he was an award-winning instructor in the general areas of business strategy, management operations, ethics, and public policy. While at the university, he established the Multicultural Business Students Association, to help disadvantaged students compete and excel.
Before this, Dr. Garnand held the position of vice president for administration at Regis University in Denver. He was also a graduate faculty member in the Regis University Master’s of Business Administration (MBA) program.
John Garnand also spent career time in industry, as corporate manager of regulatory matters at U.S. West Communications. In the capacity of regulatory support, he wrote testimony and prepared documentation for state regulatory activities. He helped implement a competitive markets seminar, addressing the issues all managers in the company would face after the antitrust breakup of the Bell System. Dr. Garnand was concurrently a faculty member in the Graduate School of Public Affairs, University of Colorado at Denver.
Before these assignments, John was a high school teacher, tennis and debate coach.
I believe that lifelong teaching consequently requires lifelong learning. Learning is more than accumulation of facts; it is nurturing the hunger to understand, the yearning for meaning, and resolution of the whys of life. In the course of life, there are so many new things to learn every day—if we will be open to their existence and insistence. We become what we learn.
I believe that none of us was fully prepared when the call came to become a Caregiver to our loved one diagnosed with a major disease. Caregiving is "on-the-job-learning" and that leads us to the purpose for this book.
This book is my effort to pull together all the information that I have had to learn over nine years of attending to my cancer patient loved one. It is my hope that this compilation will make it easier for other Cancer Caregivers faced with similar circumstances.