Under Tony Bartholomew’s care, his wife Monica survived breast cancer | chemotherapy | red devil

DESCRIPTION

Tony Bartholomew had become reunited with the woman who would become his wife, Monica, when in 2015, Monica learned she had a tumor in her breast.  She went to surgery, had the breast removed, and doctors took some lymph nodes to test them, and sure enough, it was Stage III cancer.  Post-surgery, she would have to undergo chemotherapy, an aggressive cocktail commonly known as ‘Red Devil.’ 

Monica was scheduled to undergo chemotherapy for 12 weeks.  After each hospital visit, always on a Thursday, she would stay with Tony.  Then she would go home and return to Tony’s place on a Wednesday prior to her next visit. 

Monica decided to halt the chemo after ten weeks.  During that time, she lost all of her hair, got very weak, and her white blood cell count became dangerously low.  She could not use her fingers and her toes were bending.  Doctors offered to put her on radiation treatment for the remaining two weeks, but because it could do severe damage to one of her lungs, she declined.

Tony and Monica sold their homes, moved in together in Placerville, California and eventually married.  Tony decided he would do whatever he needed to do to care for Monica with no consideration for his convenience.  He made the hour-long drive to her hospital visits.  When they were home, Monica loved to cook and clean, and they found it therapeutic to let Monica do was much as she could.  When she reached a point in which she could do no more, Tony took over, and Monica napped.

Monica reached the five-year mark after her surgery and has been pronounced cancer free.  Her toes are still bent and at times she has trouble walking, but the experience, as awful as it was at times has brought them closer together.

By way of advice, Tony Bartholomew suggests anyone placed in the role of caregiver to learn as much as possible about the type of cancer the person for whom they are caring, has.  He also urges the caregiver to forget about themselves to keep the person they are caring for, top of mind.

Additional Resources:

Cancer Interviews: https://www.cancerinterviews.com

TRANSCRIPT

Bruce Morton: Greetings and welcome to the @CancerInterviews podcast.  Thanks for joining us.  I’m your host, Bruce Morton.  Aiding someone on a cancer journey is never easy.  There’s a lot of caring involved and a lot of learning.  In most instances, a caregiver already knows how to care, but the learning piece often involves things that are not part of his or her skill set.  Our guest on this episode did plenty of both.  He is Tony Bartholomew of Placerville, California, and he has quite a story to tell, so now let’s hear it, and Tony, welcome to Cancer Interviews.

Tony Bartholomew: Hi, Bruce.  Thank you.

BM: Tony, we are going to start with a two-part question which could necessitate a long answer because it covers a lot of ground.  You are with us to talk about being a caregiver for your wife, Monica; but at the time she was diagnosed, you two were not yet married, so first off, give us a brief history of how you two met, and how from a health perspective, she noticed something wasn’t quite right.

TB: Well, we first met in high school, we actually dated a little bit.  Then we both got married and moved away and did our own thing.  In about 2014, I was divorced, and she was divorced, and I went to a celebration of the high school that I went to, its 50th anniversary.  At that event, I met a young lady that I also knew.  I told her I was divorced and living up in Placerville, and she said that Monica lives in (nearby) Auburn, and she is divorced.  I said that’s terrific and asked for Monica’s phone number.  The woman said she would take my number and give it to Monica.  So, Monica and I ended up talking for several weeks, just getting to know each other by phone, and then we met in Placerville for our first date, which was for lunch.  It progressed from there and she still lived in Auburn and around sometime in 2015, she went to the doctor, and she was told she had breast cancer, that there was a tumor on her breast.  She called me and told me about it, and I said let’s roll with it.  She was still working and continued to work for quite a while through the whole situation.  She went to surgery, she had her breast removed, and they took some lymph nodes to test them, and sure enough, it was Stage III cancer, so it is good that they removed it before it turned into Stage IV.  That point is a little shaky with me as to how this happened, but for a while, she was taking chemo and she had to go to Roseville Kaiser for chemo, while I lived in Placerville, so she would come and stay the night before at my place and then in the morning we would go to Kaiser, and she would do chemo.  One thing I want to mention about chemo.  In the adult treatment area at Kaiser, there are 85 positions for people to come in and they are normally all full.  So, she would come in, sit in her position, put the chemo in her, this is poison we’re talking about, in fact, the first treatment is called ‘Red Devil,’ and it definitely is.  I had no idea what was going on and they ended up putting a pick in her chest so they could just hook it into the pick and give her the chemo.  This stuff is just deadly.  It’s basically killing you.  You are going on the edge of being killed, as opposed to dying of cancer.  Those are the two options, and neither one is good; but she did the chemo, she was scheduled for 12 weeks.  During those weeks she would come to my house, stay the night then we would go to Kaiser and then she would come back with me for a couple of days and stay with me on the weekends because the Kaiser visits were always on a Thursday.  On the weekend she would go back to her house until the following Wednesday night when she would come and see me, and we would go to Kaiser on Thursday.  We did this for about ten weeks, during which time she lost all of her hair, she got very weak, her blood became almost not blood, and they told her that her white blood cell count was down so far that it was dangerous.  So, she made a decision to stop the chemo after the tenth week.  By that time, she was very weak, and the blood was bad, she lost her hair, her fingers were getting unusable, her toes were bending, they stayed bent, they still are.  I subsequently learned it is dangerous to sleep with someone who is undergoing chemotherapy because you can suffer its consequences as well.  At that point, I didn’t care.  If my comforting her helped to save her life, I wanted to comfort her.  Eventually it came to the point where we both sold our homes and had a house built near Placerville, and we moved in together, and we got married.  We have been living together for quite a while.  It is hard for her.  She has finally got her hair back, and I cannot see somebody going through this alone, I just can’t; and that’s not the only reason I did it because I love her, but to see all these husbands that leave their wives when they find out they have got breast cancer is unbelievable.  The other thing is, she finally decided to have the breast rebuilt and she went in for surgery and had it rebuilt and there is a way they take it out of your back and they form it, and I am telling you, they did a fantastic job.  She has been five years clear of cancer, so it was a happy ending.  The unhappy part of it is, her toes are still curled, and she still has some problems with weakness, and she takes 26 million vitamins a day just to make sure she stays healthy.  This experience was unusual for me because I had never experienced cancer, I had never experienced being so close to someone who was suffering from cancer and I will tell you, it is very enlightening.  It just drew us closer together, and it came to the point where we belonged together, we were one.  That’s nice and still is.  I got together in 2015, it’s been seven years, and we are just as close as we always have been. 

BM: Tony, I want to backtrack a little bit and go back to the time in which Monica first shared with you that she had been diagnosed.  If you would, enumerate all the thoughts that went through your mind at that time when you heard this staggering news.

TB: Very staggering because she was upset, of course.  The doctor just told her she had Stage III cancer, and she had to have it taken out and had to have chemo.  I am happy to say my thoughts were always with her.  There were no thoughts of danger to myself, or inconvenience to myself.  It was that we were going to do this together and we were going to get it done.  I never thought any bad thoughts about it.

BM: In terms of going forward, once you got that news and that you were going to be there for her in every possible way, did you formulate sort of a gameplan as to what you needed to do?

TB: I needed to go with her and help her as much as I could, but she was still working for quite a while because that was her medical insurance.  That was her best bet because the company that she worked for was paying part of her medical expenses and so that helped her.  They were very good about it.  They let her leave when they she had to go or if she was having a bad day, they would let her go home.  It was pretty good, but it came to the point where we had to make a decision on the Auburn-Placerville thing.  She lived in Auburn, and I lived in Placerville and that is over an hour apart.  That was really inconvenient for both of us, and I told her that if she moved in with me that would be good, so what we did, originally moving in to my house.  She sold her house and we moved into mine for a while, but with plans to eventually find another house to live in.  We did a lot of searching together.  One day she stumbled across this empty lot, which led to our having a house built there. 

BM: Once you two were in the same house, in terms of caregiving, I don’t what the right word, is, tasks or duties, whatever you did, what did those duties consist of?

TB: The simplest one is cooking.  She is a master cook.  As far as relaxing, I tried to get her to rest as much as she could during the day, but she is pretty charged up, she likes to go do things like cooking, cleaning, that kind of thing and I kind of let her do her own thing and I helped and would offer to help with this or that, and that’s all she wanted was somebody around her to help her with the everyday things and that’s what I did.

BM: You also had to deal with the building of a house and if you might have been retired at the time, there is still the business of living, if you will.  So, you might have had a number of balls in the air.  Was it difficult to manage all those non-cancer things and take care of Monica at the same time?

TB: Not for me.  For me, that was my life.  I had retired in 2011, so I was already retired, so it was easy for me in terms of worrying about that.  We each have a pension.  Our time was mainly taken up with the house.  We just loved it.  We would sit down, watch TV and watch four or five home shows just to get different ideas what kind of flooring, what kind of paint we wanted, so we kinda got into that.  We had no set house plan.  We were trying to figure out what to do, so there is another thing we were looking up as we were looking up different building ideas.  We found an architect and away we went.

BM: You had mentioned a Kaiser hospital.  How far was it from Placerville to Roseville for her various treatments?

TB: Again, it was a task that I just took blindly.  I did this repeatedly for ten weeks, about an hour’s journey.  I wouldn’t change a thing.

BM: I asked about your going to Kaiser because when you went to Kaiser taking Monica to the hospital for a treatment; once you were in the hospital, you were a second set of eyes.  How important was that?

TB: I was a second set of eyes and mainly I was support.  I would wait with her in the waiting room, we would go in and she would get her location.  As I said, they had 85 different stations set up and they were set maybe 10-12 feet apart, so we had other people sitting around us in the same situation, whether it be different kinds of cancer.  So, I would sit there and be amazed at the whole thing, and I would basically take care of her needs while she is sitting there because you have to wait awhile for the chemo to go into your body and take effect.  We would talk and we had plenty to talk about between the house and our barrel-making business and our lives and families.  Her daughter would come from nearby Sacramento, and it just took up the time to have me there to talk to her, to be there for her and have somebody to communicate with.  It would have been awful lonesome to go there, sit for a couple hours by herself, have this horrible ‘red devil’ put in you and then drive home and be alone.  I could not see that.  I could not see any person going through that, much less a person that I cared so much for.

BM: Did you accompany Monica into the exam room so that you were also a second set of eyes?

TB: No, I concentrated my support on the time she was at the station getting the chemo and, in the time to follow.

BM: As you look back on this, what would say was the most challenging part of your caregiving experience?

TB: The hardest part for me was letting her go and do what she wanted to do.  She wanted to go home and start working around the house.  I ad let her do that.  I didn’t want to, but it wasn’t my issue.  It was her issue and I had to let her do what she needed to do, and leave it at that.  I had plenty of stuff to take care of.  I would be down in the shop working on stuff, taking care of the dog, so I had stuff to do, so let her basically have her own decisions about where she goes and what she does.  I didn’t have to disagree with anything she did; all I had to do was mention to her that she didn’t have to do this or that, that she should take a nap.  Again, it was support.  That’s all there is.

BM: Tony, as you look back on your caregiving experience, it is not entirely past tense, but one would hope the worst is behind you, it sounds like you have taken everything in stride and any task that came your way, you just went right ahead and addressed it.  If you had to give yourself a letter grade as a caregiver, what grade would you give yourself?

TB: Probably an A-.  I couldn’t go with her to Roseville every time Monica needed to be taken to the hospital and sometimes her daughter would go.  So, I wasn’t there one hundred percent.  I was there 99 percent, so, I have to take the ‘minus’ on the A.

BM: But that’s still a pretty good grade.  Obviously, you are going to remember the day Monica revealed to you that she had breast cancer, but was there a stage in this journey in which you and she felt you guys were getting the upper hand on cancer?

TB: Wow.  That chemo is so deadly and so poisonous that it was actually taking her life.  We had that discussion about stopping before her scheduled stop.  She was supposed to take 12 weeks, but she only took ten.  The other issue was, they wanted her to do radiation, also.  Monica asked the doctor how much the radiation treatment would help her because the radiation would take part of her lung and make the lung not usable.  That’s a lot.  So, we talked about it and she told that there is only about a five percent difference between what the radiation does and what the chemo has done.  Basically, she made a decision that it wasn’t worth that five percent to go through radiation and lose use of a lung and get burned in your chest.  I also helped her with that decision, but she made it.

BM: Was there a feeling that there was sort of a light at the end of the tunnel, that Monica was moving closer to normalcy, from a physical perspective?

TB: You always have hope and pray that everything works out fine and that the chemo was worth it.  A lot of time chemo doesn’t help and that the patient finds out that the chemo isn’t doing its job, so they stop the chemo and that’s the end of it.  You are going to just go ahead and die.  So, that was always there.  We always had a bit of hope, and we had a bit of religious feeling, too, and we were praying and hoping that the chemo did its job and that these nurses and doctors were good at what they did, because they had a life in their hands.  I think Kaiser did an excellent job of making sure she was comfortable and that they took care of the cancer.  And they let her make the decision about not getting radiation and I agreed with it, so, that was the extent of the relationship with Kaiser.

BM: So, in terms of the here and now, if you think of Monica pre-diagnosis at one hundred percent, in terms of her overall health and her going about her day-to-day life, if you could quantify, how close is she to one hundred percent percent?

TB: I could try.  Like I said, her toes are still curled up and that’s difficult for her when she walks or puts shoes on or anything like that, and sometimes she has a little bit of weakness in terms of working with her hands, but I would say she is at 90 percent of what she was.

BM: And is that in its own way cause for celebration that she is at 90 percent?

TB: Yeah.  We’ll take what we can get, and we got the best we could get.  It was either that or death.  We look back and we say it was worth it to reach the point in which we can say she is cancer-free.  For five years she had to take a pill that had chemo in it, but was real mild, and at five years she was pronounced cancer-free, and she got to stop taking that pill.  That was a big step, too, because you never know if or when it is going to come back.

BM: Tony, evaluating your caregiving experience, would you say in some way it evolved, in other words, are you doing anything now that you hadn’t thought when you started?

TB: That’s part of my enjoyment now is that I learned a lot.  I learned a lot about her, I learned a lot about cancer, I learned a lot about chemo, and it doesn’t hurt to have as much education as you can, and boy, that was an education for me.

BM: Tony, we are going to wrap up now and we are going to wrap up the way we always we do with the following question.  Let’s say you encounter someone who has just learned they will be a caregiver to someone diagnosed with breast cancer or any form of cancer.  If you had a message for that person and that message included one point that stands out above all others, what would it be?

TB: It would be, don’t worry about yourself.  You see what they are going through, you are going to be there as a sounding board, as a helper, as a lover, as everything you can be and forget about your own life, forget about yourself because you are doing the all-important thing.

BM: Wonderful.  Tony Bartholomew, Placerville, California, thank you very much for your time and your story.  I have no doubt that for anybody who is watching or listening that they are going to derive information and inspiration from this interview.  Tony, thanks so much for your time.

TB: Thank you, Bruce, and take care.

BM: That will wrap up this edition of Cancer Interviews.  We want to remind you if you or a loved one are on a cancer journey, that you are not alone.  There are people like Tony, who have much in the way of timely information for you that can aid your journey.  So, until next time, we’ll see you on down the road.

SHOW NOTES

TITLE: Tony Bartholomew, Breast Cancer Patient Caregiver – Placerville, California, USA

Not long after Tony Bartholomew reconnected with Monica, his high school girlfriend, she was diagnosed with Stage III breast cancer. Without a moment’s hesitation, Tony sprang into action as Monica’s caregiver and was by her side through every step of a journey that included ten very difficult weeks of chemotherapy. She has been cancer free since 2017 and the two are now married.

Additional Resources:

Cancer Interviews: http://www.cancerinterviews.com

Time Stamps:

02:25 Girlfriend-turned-wife Monica learned she had breast cancer.

03:35 Tony recalls Monica going in for her first chemo treatment.

05:14 Monica was scheduled to go in for twelve chemo treatments but stopped after ten.

07:40 Tony said caregiving was a totally new experience.

08:55 When Monica was diagnosed, Tony devoted all his thoughts and energy to her.

13:12 Tony names his caregiving duties.

28:28 Advice for other caregivers.

KEYWORDS (tags):

breast cancer

cancer

cancerinterviews.com

chemo

bruce morton

red devil

cancer interviews

radiation therapy