My struggle to save my marriage

I am a 38 year old father of three and the husband of a stage four breast cancer survivor.  I am also a Naval Officer with 19 years of service as a Family Nurse Practitioner and Critical Care Nurse.   My wife and I have been together since we were 14 years old and we have been married since 2001. We have made it through 4 combat deployments and have moved our family 6 times over the last 18 years.  But the hardest thing that we have done together was fighting cancer and dealing with the calamities of life after cancer treatment.  

We got the diagnosis in 2015, the week I returned from my last six month deployment.  Please do not take offence when I use the term “We” because my wife and I are a team.  We both came from broken dysfunctional families and have relied on each other for all of our adult lives.  It has been me and her through thick and thin.   

 Over the last decade I have spent years in the thick of combat medicine and have seen the product of true evil, but none of my experiences prepared me for the words “Sir, your wife has stage four metastatic invasive ductile carcinoma”.  I have always been a nerd when it comes to academia and I wish I could afford to be a Van Wilder and stay in college learning but at that moment I wished I didn’t know what all of my medical training had taught me.  My wife and I talked with our doctors and surgeons and developed our plan to save her life.  We spent the next year year kicking cancers butt.  

The first part of 2015 was spent in and out of hospitals.  My wife’s first surgery was a radical bilateral mastectomy with expanders placed intraoperatively.  The next month she had her second surgery to place a right subclavian med-port followed by 32 rounds of bi-weekly chemo and 13 days of daily radiation therapy.  There are no words for the pain I lived with watching my wife suffer.  I prayed that God would let me suffer in her place.  But that was not to be.  I turned my switch and went into care taker mode.  I did everything for my wife including feeding, bathing and coordinating her treatment.  Medically I did everything I could in our home to minimize her exposure to sick people in the doctors’ offices and clinics.  I draw her labs at home, gave her hydration through her med-port.  I also managed her medication regimen to control her nausea and pain.  I gave her Neupogen and Procrit at home to keep her blood counts up.  After the hell of chemo therapy my wife went on to have a total hysterectomy and three breast augmentations/repairs.  For two years my life consisted of taking care of her and my kids which put my career and self on the back burner. 

Remission was the original goal but I soon came to realize that my new goal was trying to save my marriage and keep my family together.  My wife was not the same woman that she was prior to cancer and our marriage went into what I call roommate status.  My life partner now wanted to be independent and in her words live life on her terms.  At first I was all in 100% but after a year or two of her spending her days shopping and spending every piney we had on things that we did not need and on trips that she and the kids did by themselves because I had to work started to wear on me.  All of the things that she did as a “Domestic Engineer” (the term I use for my wife because being a stay at home mom is so much more than people think) prior to cancer were not important to her anymore.  She would not grocery shop, would not do laundry, clean the house, or anything else that she did not want to do.  Her famous statement was “I am not going to spend my time cleaning the house just for the kids to mess it up again”.  This drove me nuts at the time because I was leaving the house a 0430 to go to work and returning at 1800 to a disaster every day.  I spent all of my off time doing what I thought she should have been doing around the house while I was at work.  In my eyes I thought she should manage the house so that when I was off we could do fun things with the kids. My animosity toward her only made things worse and not talking to her about it only compounded my frustration.

During this time I tried to talk to my wife but she was not receptive.  She would tell me that I abandoned her during her treatment, leaving her in the bed for days on end.  She went as fair as to tell me that the only reason I was still with her was because it would look bad if I left her during her cancer treatment.  Even when our friends told her about all I had done for her she would not relent.  In her defense I did put her on a medication regimen after each round of chemo that prevented her from vomiting, having panic attacks and feeling the intense bone pain.  The up side was that my wife never experienced the post chemo nausea and vomiting. The down side was that the antiemetic, antianxiety, and pain meds caused a conscious sedation effect.  She does not remember all the bad times.  But that reality does little to ease the sting of being pushed aside and loathed by the love of my life.  And at the time the way I tried to communicate my feelings to her was not very therapeutic.  I complained but did not take the time to sit down and listen.  During this time the things that made my wife reject me made me pull away and the things that made me have anger towards her amplified her discontent toward me.  We both needed something from the other but we did not verbalize it so the polarization of our relationship continued.

After the third year I started to give up.  I was done, tired of being rejected.  Due to the hormone blockers and total hysterectomy my wife was in full menopause.  She had no estrogen, no sex drive and had no desire to be intimate with me on any level.  No matter how often I told her she was still beautiful and that I loved her she would push back.  Every time I tried to hold her or get her into the mood the answer was always no.  She would tell me that all I wanted was sex and to stop asking.  She just did not have a need or desire for sex or a husband.  I asked her to go to therapy with me.  I wrote her letters telling her how I felt and what I needed from her with no resolve.  Looking back the letters did not work because they were one sided.  It was me telling her what I wanted. 

 So as I said I was at a cross roads. I thought that I wanted to leave my wife to find a woman that could return my love and affection.  A woman that would be appreciative of the life I worked for and support me.  To tell you the truth I was empty and lonely.  I physically needed someone to touch me, to talk to me and not at me, to show and give me physical and emotional love.  At this point I was three years into this fight.  And at this point I say “I” because in my reality my wife was no longer part of my team.  But I still loved my wife and our family.  Deep down I did not want another woman and the thought of not being with my kids every day ripped me to the core.  My wife and I both grew up without a father and I did not want to repeat that cycle with my two sons and daughter.

The day I sat my wife down at the kitchen table and gave her my “ultimatum” was not my finest moment as a man or as a father because I had given up on my marriage.  At the time I was dying emotionally and hurt from my wife’s rejection.  I told her that I loved her and always would but I could not continue to be her punching bag.  I told her that I was done giving her everything that I had to give and not getting anything but rejection in return.  I told her I wanted my wife back and that I needed her to remember that she was a wife not just a mother, not just a cancer survivor.  One of the things I used to tell her was that “You have cancer baby, cancer does not have you”.  I told her that she had survived the battle with cancer but she was losing me.  To say this hurt was an understatement.  But I am glad I did it. Because we started talking again and to my surprise she felt the same way.  I was not giving her what she needed and she resented me for it.  We had spent the last few years in hell because we did not take the time to listen.  The bible says to be quick to listen and slow to anger.  This should be in wedding vows because it works better than anything else on the market.

Looking back I think that my wife was doing what she needed to heal from her battle.  She needed the freedom she found with not worrying about anyone but herself and doing what made her happy.  The blunt conversation that day was the catalyst our marriage needed to start the healing process for our marriage.  We started talking again and both of us agreed to start working toward repairing our relationship.  I cannot say that it has been easy, but I can tell you that I would not have it any other way. 

We talk openly about what we need and desired from each other both in the bedroom and in life.   We still struggle with maintaining intimacy and our sex life but we both talk openly about it. Due to the chemical and surgical induced menopause, multiple surgical scars and absence of all estrogen and progesterone sex is both physically and emotionally difficult for my wife.  Again talking about sex openly is key because what used to work and come natural before cancer goes out the window.  The up side is that I got to relearn how to please my wife.  I got somethings right and a lot wrong but again openly talking about what she liked and what hurt or made her uncomfortable was how we worked through it.  Through our open but sometimes uncomfortable conversations I learned that she lacks the desire for physical sex so she has to make the mental decision to make love to me.  This hurt me at first and to be honest it still does today but we continue to work through it.  In my eyes my wife had only breath air to make me physically desire her but that is not the case for her anymore. She needs me to speak her love language and provide her with all the support and emotional love I can give so she will want to make the mental decision to be physical with me.  To say this is easy for us is laughable but if it was easy everyone would do it and the divorce rates would plummet.

Some of the things that I have told my wife might be construed as selfish but to me they are as important as oxygen to a marriage.  My love language is physical touch and my wife’s is acts of service.  Having my wife understand that sex is not just a physical activity to me has been key.  Telling her in my own words that when we are intimate and make love it is the closest we can be as a couple.  I told her that making love to her is an emotional and vulnerable act where I can let down my walls and be totally vulnerable to her. I told my wife how important it was and how it makes me feel wanted when she gives me random compliments, flirts with me, and even initiates sex.  

These open conversations and the work that we have put into meeting each other’s emotional and physical needs is what has saved our marriage to this day.  A marriage cannot survive without open communication and mutual respect.  And without intimacy and an active sex live you will lose a big part of what makes a marriage because without it you are roommates.  Something that I have learned through all of this is that you make time for what is important to you.  And my wife and kids are my world.  Cancer is in our past and the future is not garneted so live in the present and enjoy each day that comes.

D. Moore