http://csn.cancer.org/node/166919 Comments for "Drugging the fear and pain away" en-csn http://csn.cancer.org/node/166919#comment-636840 <p>Dave..Sorry about your situation. It sounds like you have many things going on at once..and they are all emotional. Rather than drugging yourself into a stupor to ease the pain, the only way to deal with it is to go through it. Opiates are not the real answer. I know this is not what you were hoping to hear. You need to be alert for your wife and her situation so you can make clear decisions. And as far as the girlfriend goes, well, she has pain also because she is sharing your heart with someone else. So if it seems like she is not there all the time for you, it might be her way of self-protection. All three of you in this situation are hurting. There is one drug that you might ask about..Bextra. It is a mild anti-depressant. It is not a miracle over night cure. It is a drug that works slowly until one day you will just wake up and think, gosh, I feel better. It does help you sleep and think more clearly. And takes a lot of the heavy emotion out. I was on this for awhile to cope with many things going on in my life. It takes about two weeks or so to begin getting into and building up in your system. Finally, is there someone you can talk with at the VA or some other place? I think you really could benefit from being in a support group where others are sharing their stories. You can lean on each other. Let us know how you are doing.....Cindy</p> Wed, 01 Apr 2009 15:54:03 -0400 Cindy54 comment 636840 at http://csn.cancer.org http://csn.cancer.org/node/166919 <p>People, I'm not strong. My wife, the patient, handles this many, many times better than I do. All at once, I have my wife's old breast cancer come back, matasasized (sp?) into lung cancer. At the same time, my girlfriend (it's okay, my wife approved) decided she wanted to be more responsible for herself and "independent", so though she calls three or four times a day with her concerns and needs, and though we still see each other, she's not "there for me" when my wife's cancer is in the scariest phases, leaving me alone with it. I drug myself a lot, just to keep from the easiest solution, eating a bullet. But this is no good, tolerance grows, expenses grow, and we need to concentrate on my wife, not on me.</p> <p><a href="http://csn.cancer.org/node/166919">read more</a></p> http://csn.cancer.org/node/166919#comment Caregivers Wed, 01 Apr 2009 14:49:49 -0400 AA4DF 166919 at http://csn.cancer.org