How Can You Help Your Loved One During Breast Cancer Treatment?
There are so many ways to help. The following is the short list of options to help trigger your instincts and creativity and help you support your loved one during breast cancer treatment.
Provide rides to chemotherapy or radiation treatments.
Make a meal for your friend or her family, but be sensitive to the side effects one experiences during cancer treatments. Avoid heavy gravy on meats and rich foods that may upset her stomach, and foods that are not easily digested.
Go to a doctor appointment to be a second set of ears.
Go along for a massage, a car ride, time at the beach, or whatever your loved one's favorite activity. This will help you both with a feeling of normalcy during treatments
Be outrageous! Give your loved one permission to be outrageous. Suggest a do-rag instead of a wig, go on a motorcycle ride if she is up to it, or plan a weekend away and tell her that the weekend is a special weekend for her.
Celebrate significant dates during breast cancer treatment. For example, help plan a party to celebrate the final chemotherapy treatment for her, but make sure she doesn't do all the work.
Celebrate all important milestones, years after her breast cancer treatment. For example, have a pizza party on her fifth year of living with breast cancer and invite all the people that helped her get through her treatments.
Allow your relationship to grow and change, and be there and just listen. You may be the only one that she can talk to and with whom she is comfortable talking about what is really on her mind.
Just be there, be present and available to her.
