I’m a big believer in men. They can do some amazing things. Lord knows they’ve achieved some wondrous feats in life. But when it comes to being cancer caregivers, let’s just say the jury is still out on that, especially when it comes to women and “intimate cancers”, like breast, ovarian, cervical, and even colon. Nothing breaks my heart more than to hear a group of breast cancer survivors talk about the rejection they experienced from the men in their lives. It makes me want to go out and rattle some cages, asking, “What the $#@&* is wrong with you? How could you do that to her? Don’t you know how fantastic she is?”
Why is this? I have my own theory. We are, by nature, sexual creatures. We imagine, we fantasize, we dream of those perfect moments on some sun-drenched beach in the middle of nowhere, where wrinkles and cellulite don’t exist and “close encounters of the flesh kind” lead to wild and crazy passion, legs up in the sand. Real life very often doesn’t look like that. Emotions can get messy, especially when cancer’s involved and there’s great uncertainty in prognosis and diagnosis.
As a family caregiver, I’ve seen both sides of the story and I’ve reached a conclusion. Men are capable of doing more to really support the women they love and women need to appreciate that men provide that care differently. What does it take? Education on both sides. Best time to do it? At the beginning, in the early days of treatment.
Men need to know what the women they love are facing. How do they get that information? Let’s be honest. Most guys aren’t going to go to support groups to sit around and listen to emotionally-charged conversations about cancer. By nature, men tend to be proactive when it comes to problems. They’re constantly on the prowl for fixes. Cancer? Not always turned off at the flick of a switch. You can’t do X and be sure you’ll get Y as the result. You can knock your head against that tumor till the cows come home and you won’t put a dent in it. While most men are action-oriented, cancer support for women is often far more emotion-oriented. It can feel like oil and water mixing. Someone’s bound to slip on that slick and get hurt.
Men often process information and situations very differently than women do. Maybe that’s our biggest mistake as women, that we assume if men really love us they’ll do things our way, to please us. As someone who used to work with male psychiatric patients, I can assure you that it’s a hurdle not really worth the effort. The human brain is what it is. It’s wired as it’s wired. You can’t suddenly change the system. If the connectors and receptors in the brain don’t work that way, no amount of wishing will change that. Men are what they are, just as women are what they are. Your relationship up until cancer hits is pretty much what you might expect through treatment. Some men are talkers, but most aren’t. If the man who loves you does for you, you can probably go on expecting that. But if the man you love tends towards narcissitic behavior, if you have to fight your way to the mirror every morning, cancer’s not going to improve that, and your body image is probably going to take a hit over it.
We can and should take advantage of the way men tend to think to improve how they care for the women they love. I know a lot of men who are “hunters”. They may not sit around talking about their wives and girlfriends going through cancer treatment, but they will and do go on the Internet in search of information and answers. They will and do read personal accounts that provide a lot of technical information and concrete advice on what to do and how to get through it. Men need proactive tips and encouragement for helping their wives and girlfriends through cancer.
In other words, maybe it’s time we “train” men to be cancer caregivers according to their learning styles. Perhaps by taking an overwhelmingly emotional approach, we’ve failed to tap into the strengths that men can and will bring as cancer caregivers. Men are, by nature, usually good at “survivor” mode. They are body-observant. They eat, sleep, and hunt for what they need to live. Cancer is a very emotional disease and very often our introduction to it is chaotic and confusing.
What if we could reach out to men in the early stages of providing care and help them to find concrete ways to do it, ways in which they can make a positive difference for the women they love? I’ve had more than one man tell me over the years that women should never pay as much attention to a man’s words as his actions. Men will often say what women want to hear in order to get what they want. In cancer care, that’s not always a smart move. Women can feel tremendously betrayed when the words are hollow and empty.
In my conversations with men over the years, I’ve drawn a conclusion that may come as a shock to any woman who has felt her man didn’t care. Men care profoundly, deeply, sometimes even madly about the women they love and even the women in their families. But cancer makes men feel utterly powerless, and men don’t normally do “powerless” well.
I’ve seen that frustration up close with a man whose sister had a double mastectomy. His anger, his rage at what she went through in battling the disease was close to the surface. I could observe how raw this wound was for him. Why? Because he was so used to being a protector, the big brother who always looked after his baby sister. There was little he felt he could do for her as she faced this nasty foe. This caring, compassionate, strong man didn’t have the tools he needed and it infuriated him. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, it was that he cared so much, it was overwhelming. What happens when men have a much more intimate relationship with the women they love? What happens when husbands and boyfriends face that same powerful wall of emotions? Very often, as a matter of self-preservation, they turn off their emotions and just move on automatic pilot. That can come across as cold and unfeeling when the truth is they care too much to let it out.
I’ve heard women express their disappointment in how husbands, boyfriends, and even male relatives deal with their cancer. I definitely get it. Every woman wants to believe that no matter what happens to her, the men she loves will stand by her through the battle. So, how can we make that happen better?
Maybe we need to dispense with the myth that men and women aren’t equal as family caregivers. Just as male nurses and female nurses are equally capable of providing quality care in the medical setting, and male and female physicians must handle the same physical patient issues with equal competency, there’s no reason men can’t be wonderful caregivers. I still think that the style of care tends to be different, with some basic shared traits. Just as we used to assume that all women make great mothers, cooks, and homemakers, we have learned that’s not the case. Women aren’t born to be good with kids. It takes experience and education. Many of the women in my generation grew up taking care of siblings, neighborhood kids, and even worked jobs as teenagers that put us in the position of having to cope with runny noses, wayward children, and unexpected disasters (Lord knows I’ve pulled my share of kids off of roofs and stopped some of the world’s dumbest stunts just before that final idiotic ride off the ramp). We tend to forget that we learned how to care for the people around us. By the same token, I’ve known some women who were absolute disasters as caregivers. They were so anxious about their own needs, they weren’t capable of nurturing another person. A good caregiver is strong, with a thick skin, a hard head, and able to weather the storm, but you get that way by training, not by chance.
What does it take to be a family caregiver? Education, not estrogen. An understanding and an appreciation of what men and women can and can’t do. We should utilize men in the caregiver situation according to what we can teach them to do better. And we should recognize that, while they have strengths that can and will support women with cancer, they are not going to suddenly sprout wings and turn into cancer angels.
One of the things I always try to emphasize as a caregiver educator is that every patient needs to bring a team to the caregiver table. Every member of the caregiver team is going to be different from the other people involved, and folks will bring what skills they have to the table. The trick is to use the raw ingredients to make a complete meal, and that often means gaining new skills as you go. It’s important to recognize that every patient is different because of diagnosis, prognosis, energy level, independence level, emotional quotient, and a myriad of other factors. But if we begin to understand how to teach men to be better caregivers, not by trying to turn them into the female equivalent, but by using them in ways that make sense according to their capabilities, we should be able to produce some amazing male caregivers. It’s all about bringing out the best in the men who will care for these women with cancer.
Bottom line? We have some amazing wives, mothers, sisters, cousins, neighbors, and friends who have the capacity to survive cancer, and we should all strive to make the quality of their survival the best it can be. There are a lot of good, decent men out there who feel completely lost in the cancer fight. We can and should give them directions on what they can do better to support the women they love, through educating them in ways they can utilize to connect physically, mentally, and most importantly, emotionally. There will always be men and women who live life superficially, who can’t get past the scars, but for those people who hold promise as cancer caregivers, let’s empower them.