I recall someone mentioning that one of the things they enjoyed during treatment was all the extra time they spent with their spouse. This is something that had not really occurred to me.

My hubby and I spent every waking moment (pretty much) together for 16-months while on our bike trip. Then we spent 1 year living on opposite sides of the country when he moved to SF and I stayed in Ottawa to work on my PhD. So, we’ve see-sawed on this. We’ve spent a lot of time together and we’ve spend not enough time together. One of the reasons I chose to moved to SF when I did (rather than stick around longer in Ottawa) was that I didn’t like living apart. I remember telling myself that we would not intentionally do that again.

When I was diagnosed, it caused a re-set on many things. It also caused us to spend more time together – and not just more time in the infusion chair – we really spent more time with each other. Looking back over my blog posts (part of my research), I notice that I mention conversations we had while walking together in the early morning (chemo mucks with sleep patterns). It also brought me back to when we were first dating. We would often go on long walks and chat about this or that.

Reading about the walks made me realize that I’m missing them. With re-emergence life is starting to get busy again. We are starting to fall into old patterns. Not that we were not happy before, just that there was a new level of intimacy and connection that happened when we spent that intense time together. I didn’t realize I was missing it until I read about it on my blog. And so, with that, we shall try harder to make sure we have time in our week to walk – time to chat about anything and nothing all at once. We know that self-care is important, but couple-care is import too.

Feature image (c) Rebecca J. Hogue