Mesothelioma Caregiver Shares Her Story
Brunilda Villareal, the wife of a mesothelioma survivor, shares the story of how she supported her husband through his diagnosis.
We weren't given any hope. It was just, a final diagnosis. You know? This is it. He was gonna be gone from the picture. We've been together for over forty years. So how do you how how do you address that? Immensely difficult. I wouldn't allow them to speak despair or emptiness. Being a, a care provider is twenty four seven, and, I would sleep if he slept because sometimes he didn't sleep. I did everything. I did aromatherapy. I did music therapy. I would get him up. You have to get up. We're gonna walk. We're gonna go take some sun. We're gonna walk you outside. I'll take off his clothes so that he can get sun. This taste for food, he didn't have it, and he said that it would taste like iron. So he would eat, you know, like a half a teaspoon, and then, like, ten minutes later, I'd give him another half a teaspoon until he he ate a little bit. Thankfully, our son and our daughter would give me time so that I could have a moment when it's not that you forget, but that you could break away and, you know, restore yourself. We had a a good, support group in my my church. We had, a lot of prayer warriors that I had, you know, doing doing our mission of prayers. We had a lot of, close contact of people visiting us that I knew were positive. You know, the belief that no matter what, it was going to be okay. I've learned to hope. I've learned that, things aren't final, that there are some positive things in the negative. I've learned to trust that whatever you may be going through, there's a tomorrow. And that, if you persevere, that things will be okay.
