💜 Medical, Relationship & Caregiver Articles
Caring for someone with prostate cancer can change daily life in ways you may not expect. These articles address the practical and emotional realities of caregiving, including the things caregivers often experience but may have difficulty saying out loud.
🌟Featured Articles
These articles explore some of the most important medical, relationship, caregiving, and advocacy topics facing partners and spouses today.
💜 “He’s Not the Same Person”: When Your Partner Seems Different After Prostate Cancer Treatment
Caregivers may first notice the changes in ordinary moments. Salad is put in the freezer, familiar errands go wrong, or a partner becomes angry when memory problems are mentioned. This article looks at changes in memory, depression, anger, and daily functioning, along with the caregiver’s worry about who will care for them if they become ill.
💜 Unacknowledged Losses
Some losses never appear in a medical record. In this personal essay, I write about what prostate cancer treatment changed in my husband, our marriage, and the future I thought we would share, including a loss I did not fully understand until I was living it.
Continue the Conversation
Sunday Caregiver Coffee & Conversation is a private Facebook group for partners and caregivers. New questions are posted on the first and third Sundays, with time to respond throughout Sunday and Monday.
💜 What Listening to Caregivers Taught Me About Love, Loss, and Adaptation
A reflection on the lessons caregivers have taught me and how those conversations changed my understanding of caregiving, relationships, grief, and healing.
You Are Not Alone
If this article resonated with you, I invite you to explore the other Relationship & Caregiver Articles, download the free caregiver resources, or learn more about Standing Beside Him.
Sometimes the hardest part is finding the words.
You don't have to do that alone.
💰 NEW: The Hidden Cost of Family Caregiving: Three Lives. Three Financial Realities
Three caregiving journeys reveal how a diagnosis can quietly reshape careers, retirement, family finances, and long-term security. Learn what every caregiver should know before the financial impact catches them by surprise.
💜 It Was His Cancer. It Changed Both of Our Lives.
A prostate cancer diagnosis affects far more than the person receiving treatment. This article explores how one diagnosis can reshape a relationship, alter daily life, and change both partners in ways they never expected, while offering hope for finding a new path forward together.
💙 Medical Articles
🌿 Hormone Therapy (ADT) Resource Center
Looking for information about ADT? Visit the Hormone Therapy (ADT) Resource Center for articles, caregiver guidance, and resources about the physical, emotional, and relationship effects of hormone therapy.
💬 Lupron Mood Swings and Emotional Changes During ADT
Learn how hormone therapy can affect emotions, mood, memory, relationships, and daily life, along with practical strategies for coping together.
Related caregiver article: “He’s Not the Same Person”: When Your Partner Seems Different After Prostate Cancer Treatment
New Research Explores Alternative Forms of Hormone Therapy
Explore emerging research and treatment options that may provide alternatives to traditional hormone therapy for some men.
💜 Relationship Articles
Serious illness and caregiving can change more than physical health. They can affect communication, intimacy, emotional connection, friendships, family relationships, and the way we relate to the people around us. These articles explore the relationship side of caregiving, including the changes that can happen between partners and the quieter ways illness and caregiving can affect other important relationships in our lives.
💜 Unacknowledged Losses
Some losses caused by illness and treatment never appear in a medical record. This personal essay explores the changes that can happen inside a marriage after prostate cancer treatment, including intimacy, emotional connection, caregiving, and the future a couple expected to share.
Featured Relationship Articles
💜 When Your Husband Starts Feeling More Like a Roommate Than a Partner
A three-part series exploring the emotional, physical, and relationship changes that many couples experience during prostate cancer treatment and ADT. Together, these articles examine both the partner's and the patient's perspective, along with practical ideas for reconnecting after treatment.
“How to Have the Conversations You Keep Putting Off”
A Conversation Guide for Couples After Prostate Cancer
Some conversations after prostate cancer are hard to begin, especially when affection, intimacy, or the relationship itself has changed. This practical guide helps couples move past guessing what the other person is thinking and begin talking with less pressure. It includes conversation starters, a simple ten-minute listening exercise, ways to pause when emotions rise, and ideas for taking one small step toward feeling closer again.
💜When Someone You Love Makes a Medical Decision You Disagree With
How do you respect their choices when you're frightened by the decisions they're making?
What happens when someone you love refuses medical care or makes a treatment decision you believe could put their life at risk?
Drawing from my experiences as a cancer patient, a wife, and a mother who lost her adult son, I explore the difficult balance between respecting someone's right to make their own medical decisions and living with the fear, worry, and sometimes grief those decisions leave behind.
This article also offers practical guidance for having difficult conversations and understanding what matters most to each person.
When Dancing Becomes a Way to Feel Close Again
At a recent prostate cancer support group in Sacramento, Craig told us that he asks his wife to dance with him every evening. He chose an Ed Sheeran song. After everything prostate cancer had changed, he wanted a way to feel close to her.
I keep thinking about that invitation. It gave them a few minutes together when they could hold each other and listen to music. Craig was telling us what he and his wife had chosen to do.
Prostate cancer can change a couple’s physical relationship. Surgery and radiation may affect erections. Hormone therapy can reduce sexual desire. Fatigue, worry, and changes in how someone feels about their body can add to the strain. Partners may miss touch and closeness too, even while trying to be patient with what the person in treatment is going through.
Those changes don’t always give couples an easy way to talk. A person may avoid reaching for their partner because they fear it will be taken as a request for sex. The other may stop asking for affection because another refusal would hurt. Both can want closeness and still feel unsure how to begin.
For some couples, a dance can be a small beginning. One person can ask, “Would you dance with me for this song?” They can hold hands or put an arm around each other, move slowly, or simply stand together and sway. They can say plainly that the invitation is for a few minutes of closeness, with no expectation of sex afterward.
It also has to be an invitation that either person can decline. Someone may be tired, in pain, unsteady on their feet, or simply not want to be touched that day. Sitting together with the song, listening without dancing, or choosing another shared moment may feel better. The point is to find something both people want.
There is some research on dance during and after cancer treatment. A review of community dance studies found possible benefits for fatigue, physical ability, mood, and quality of life. Most of those studies weren’t about prostate cancer, though, and the evidence that dance improves a couple’s relationship is limited. In one small study, cancer survivors and their partners valued the time they spent dancing together. Neither study tells us that a nightly dance will restore intimacy for every couple.
Craig’s story matters because he found a way to ask for closeness that worked for him. For another couple, it might be a familiar song on the couch, a walk, or sitting side by side after dinner. If treatment has changed your sex life or touch has become difficult, you can also ask your cancer care team about sexual health support.
What small moment helps you and your partner feel close?
Friendship, Connection & Caregiving
💜 The Friendships We Lose While Life Is Happening
What happens to friendships as we move, grow older, become caregivers, and simply get busy living our lives? After reading reflections by Pranav Jain and Steven Bartlett about the quiet loss of adult friendships, I found myself thinking about the people I have lost touch with over the years and how much harder maintaining friendships became when I was my husband's caregiver.
This is a reflection on friendship, caregiving, loneliness, and the difference between knowing what is happening in someone's life and still being part of it.
🌿 Caregiver Articles
Caring for someone with prostate cancer is a journey of constant learning. Over the coming months, I'll be adding articles that explore the everyday realities of caregiving, including practical tips, emotional support, communication, self-care, and the lessons I've learned while walking this path alongside my husband.
Please check back regularly as new articles are added.
🌻 What Happens If the Caregiver Needs Care Too?
When illness, injury, or exhaustion affects the caregiver, the entire caregiving plan can unravel. Learn how to prepare for the unexpected, build a backup support system, and protect both yourself and your partner.
🌿Intimacy
💜 When Being His Partner Suddenly Includes Intimate Care
Prostate cancer treatment can bring catheters, urinary leakage, personal care, and other changes into parts of a relationship that once felt private. This article looks at what happens when the roles of partner and caregiver begin to overlap, including changing intimacy, difficult emotions, privacy, boundaries, and knowing when to ask for help.
🌻 Emotional Support
💜 What Have You Put Aside While You’ve Been Caregiving?
Caregiving can slowly crowd out the people, interests, routines, and parts of life that once belonged to you. This article looks at caregiver loneliness, loss of identity, and what can happen when the caregiver role begins to take over. It also offers a simple way to notice what you miss and begin making room for part of your own life again.
Treatment & Recovery📘
What Wayne Carried Forward from PC-PEP
Wayne Zimmermann, a ZERO support group facilitator, followed PC-PEP from home for six months. He shares what he found useful, what he’s still working on, and what he wants partners to understand about living with prostate cancer.
New Research Explores Alternative Forms of Hormone Therapy for Prostate Cancer
A look at research on transdermal estradiol, an alternative form of hormone therapy, and what it may mean for side effects and quality of life.→ New Research Explores Alternative Forms of Hormone Therapy for Prostate Cancer
💛 Daily Life & Caregiving
💜 “He’s Not the Same Person”: When Your Partner Seems Different After Prostate Cancer Treatment
The article is related to treatment and relationships, but its main focus is what the caregiver sees at home, what the caregiver can no longer depend on, and what to do next.
When Every Conversation Starts Becoming About Cancer
👨👩👧 Children & Family
Invisible Caregivers: When Children Carry Adult Responsibilities
🌼 Emotional Transitions & Grief
When Hope and Grief Live in the Same House | What Cancer Taught Me About Hope
When Grief and Relief Exist Together
More Articles Are on the Way
The Medical, Relationship, and Caregiver Article Library will continue to grow as I write about the questions, challenges, and experiences that partners and caregivers share with me every day.
I hope you'll visit often as new articles are added.