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In This Article:

• What caregiving really means when someone you love is fighting cancer
• How love evolves through pain, fear, and recovery
• The challenges and emotional toll of being a caregiver
• How patience, boundaries, and honesty build stronger support
• Lessons in gratitude from those who care, unconditionally

Love in Tough Times: Caring Without Losing Yourself

by Maryann Weston, author of the book: Revealing Light.

Love is the ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves without any insistence that they satisfy you.  -- Wayne Dyer

I have been both cancer carer and cancer fighter and I know that the carer’s road is a tough one too. When your loved one is fighting cancer, they are undergoing deep changes that you may not understan.

Cancer changes you and, hopefully, makes you a better and stronger person. However, it’s not easy to see a loved one change before your eyes; become more independent and, sometimes, more forceful.

One of the ways I changed was in finding my voice. I’d been largely introverted before cancer and, yes, shy. Sure, I got better at hiding this over the years and, outwardly, appeared confident. Inwardly, I often felt small and would suppress my voice just to keep life running smoothly, or what I thought was smoothly.

Cancer opened me up to the possibility that it is not a bad thing to let people know how you feel or what you want. In fact, people respect the honesty and the boundaries you set.

Being a Witness

As one of the carers for my sister, I also understand what it’s like to witness changes in your loved one, when they are under the pressure, pain and suffering cancer brings.

I recall when I first came home from hospital. As soon as I hobbled in the door, I wanted to do the housework. Of course, it had already been done and I was in too much pain to achieve anything around the house then, and for a very long time. I had significant pain in my incision site and no matter how many loose pants I tried on, I couldn’t find one that didn’t add to the pain. My sisters managed to find at least eight pairs for me, but none were any good.

It was a frustrating and painful time for me. But that is what being a carer is all about, anticipating needs, stepping back when required and persisting with love despite the changes your loved one might be facing, whether that is through decreased mobility in the short term, or changes in their body image such as scarring.

Tough Love

My husband was my main carer throughout my illness and did a brilliant job though I could see times when he was frustrated with a particular request of mine: when he was tired too and I asked him to do something for me because I was sick from the chemo or experiencing the ongoing muscle burn at the incision site. In many ways he was also my coach, urging me toward physical activity, telling me not to “stoop,” advising me when I might be doing something that was not in my long-term interests.

He wasn’t overbearing with his advice, just sensible and constant. For me, this is the definition of support: constant, gentle but firm advice and action. His unwavering support through my cancer journey was a touchstone in our long relationship. Like my husband, my children reacted to my cancer by rallying and providing watchful and considerate support.

Love is... Caring

I am forever grateful to those who supported and cared for me; to my sisters who cared for me after my operation. To my brothers and my nieces and nephews with their constant source of texts, always wishing me well, and to my wonderful network of friends who came through with solid and unwavering support; I couldn’t have gone through this journey alone.

Caring for a loved one facing the long and grueling treatment that colon cancer brings, is not easy. It is natural to think that after the major operation — the colon resection — that caring is finished. It isn’t. Just like everything else, the end of the race might be in sight but there are still the hardest miles to run.

Long-Term Effects

Cancer treatment does not leave you unscathed. There are the incision sites, sometimes incisional hernias to be fixed, there is the loss of muscles, nerves and physical fitness, as well as the loss of independence.

My strongest advice is for carers to have patience when a loved one may be acting out of character — perhaps it’s their fear, or the pain, talking. Step back, be patient and things will right themselves. Remember your loved one is in the fight of their life. You just need to have their back while they fight.

And my fight, at this point, was far from over. I still had chemo to finish and another operation to face.

Copyright 2025. All Rights Reserved.

Article Source:

BOOK: Revealing Light

Revealing Light: How Cancer Illuminated My Divine Blueprint
by Maryann Weston.

A spiritual odyssey, Revealing Light: How Cancer Illuminated My Divine Blueprint tells the story of its author's psychological and spiritual evolution, from confronting her mortality with a deadly illness to creating a community of like-minded people. In 2015, amid a successful career, wife and mother Maryann Weston was diagnosed with cancer. Confronted by death, she felt inadequate and small.

If only she had known then how supremely and divinely Spirit would soon walk beside her, onto cancer's battlefield... This book is about the gifts received through adversity, about learning in the fiery waters of a spiritual baptism that many cancer warriors experience and how crisis can shatter existence to reveal divine purpose in life - a blueprint we agreed to before we were born. 

For more info and/or to order this book, click here.  Also available as a Kindle edition.

About the Author