Intimacy
Feb 24th 2010PostmasterIntimacy
I just left a chat room at caringvoices.ca. The focus was to be about my book and about engaging people in a discussion about the emotional impact of cancer. That, of course, is the overall theme of this blog, but I now realize that we have neglected the very important area of Intimacy.
Cancer can deprive women of their breasts and men and women of the ability to have sex. With that goes intimacy and, in the worst cases, your marriage. And when a marriage breaks down, the cancer patient loses the one person who should be their strongest ally. My wife, Dianne and I have struggled with this since I was first treated for Prostate Cancer almost 8 years ago. We have managed to keep our relationship strong and mutually supportive through some of the worst times. We are stronger for it and I am so much better off having her beside me. But intimacy has proved elusive and while we often talk about it, we probably don’t fight hard enough to get it back. Maybe its because we don’t know how to get it back, or what to do to replace what we’ve lost. We have a great relationship and we are the strongest cancer couple we know, but I think we are short-changing ourselves and we need to do something about it.
We would welcome any thoughts or ideas from our friends and followers of this blog.
Posted by Doug
1 Comment »
dianne on 24 Feb 2010 at 11:25 pm #
The chat was very insightful. It’s amazing that the theme was the inability to have physical intimacy, for both men and women. Very good blog Doug.