[Colleens_Husband]

Hey Skip:

I am sorry you had to find this community but I am glad that you are here and you are doing everything you can for your wife.

One of your jobs as a caregiver is to be a gatekeeper of information. You will find it is very difficult to belong to the Cancer Channel, and by that, I mean cancer 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Sometimes, as a male person, one will have a tendency to try to fill a thimble with a fire hose when it comes to dealing with cancer. Your wife is in this for a long haul and you will have ups and downs. You need to be positive where you can get away with it and you need to be a bit sneaky about re-introducing positivity to your future.

You need to remember that there are three different phases of history in dealing with HER2 cancer. There is the pre-Herceptin phase, which meant you are probably going to die if you got HER2 cancer. That is no longer the case, and any information about this cancer before Herceptin is less than useless. It just scares people.

This phase in history is the after-Herceptin phase. Everything is different now. You can expect miraculous recoveries in a whole lot of cases which people thought were hopeless prior to Herceptin.

The next phase in the history of HER2 cancer may be the TDM1 phase, which is a magic HER2 cancer killing magic bullet that seriously kick cancer butt. This may be what makes HER2 cancer deaths a very rare occurrence. Your wife doesn't have to survive forever. She just needs to last long enough for her miracle drug to become available.

Never give up. People survive this every day, and there is no reason to believe your wife won't be one of those people.

Skip, please take excellent care of your wife and your family. She is going to need you to be strong. Please know that you are not alone and that you will be in our hearts and prayers.

Lee