Silver Linings 2008
September 6
Aegean Room, Waterfront Hotel, Lahug, Cebu City
Speaker : Bobbit Suntay
Topic : How The Other Half Copes
Host  : Maritoni Fernandez 

Maritoni Fernandez: Ok, next before I start bawling again here.  Hah…. I’m so good at this. You know I’m a contra-bida ha? I’m not supposed to cry.  I’m so iyakin! Anyway, I would like to introduce our next guest. Bobbit Suntay, founder and trustee of Care Well Cancer Resource and Wellness Community, whose spouse Jackie had breast cancer.  Let’s give him a big round of applause.

(Audience clapping)

Thank you, Bobbit.

Bobbit Suntay: Thanks…. Hi, good afternoon and thank you for coming. Such a tough act to follow. Hala! I’ll try not to put you to sleep during my presentation.  I… I just want to … share with you that before I start ….I… I learned from my own personal experience caring for my wife and with the work that I’ve done with the husbands in our support community that how husbands cope is such a unique thing. No one copes the same way. Each person will find their own way to cope and coping is very, very context sensitive. It depends on the context of the husband and on the context of the wife. So with that I’d just like to give you a very, very brief background on myself and my late wife, Jackie. Jackie was a medical student at PGH when we first met and I was a high school principal. This was back in 1992. And we were both really into outdoor sports. Actually, Jackie got me into climbing, trekking, scuba diving and while we were into these, we were both really into our respective careers. So in the year 2000, we both left for the US. Jackie to do her sub-specialization in Ophthalmology. She was an eye surgeon and I to do my doctorate in Education. This was in 2000.  

Jackie graduated in July of 2003 and 2 weeks after that she was diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. She was 34 years old at that time. Jackie lasted 2 years and 2 months and she died on October 2 of 2005.  

So what I’d like to share with you briefly this afternoon, is just …. I suppose examples of how I personally coped with the situation. This is not a prescription. This is certainly not an idea as you’ll see soon enough. It’s just my sharing because as I’ve said, each person will cope in their own way. And...I think a lot of what I’m going to say will apply not only to how I coped during Jackie’s illness but even after her death.

I think one of the single most important things I did very early on was that I sought professional help. And I know for guys, for the gentlemen here in the audience, this is one of the hardest things for us to do. Ok, it’s not easy for us to acknowledge that we need help. I was telling one of the volunteers earlier today that at Care Well, we actually have a support group of husbands. These are the husbands who are taking care of their wives with cancer. There are about 12 in our support group now. It took me 6 months to learn that I was making, making a mistake in trying to form this support group. Kasi I kept inviting people – husbands support group, husbands support group. No one showed up, not once.  Why?  Because we, men don’t do support groups, we’re tough. Till one day I learned if I called it a happy hour and I serve beer and sisig, they would come. And in fact that’s what’s going on now. In the ground floor of our facility, we have a small coffee shop and twice a month we have a happy hour, sponsored by San Miguel. They actually give us beer and the men come. And to my deep surprise, we don’t talk about basketball or ZTE or whatever… they actually talk about their experiences caring for their wives. We meet for 3 and 1/2 hours. Even longer than the women support those meets at Care Well. It’s really quite unbelievable.  

So for whatever it’s worth, I… I do encourage people who are still walking along side their wives as they travel their journey, do whatever you can to get help. I personally benefited from counseling and from support groups. I know it takes time. I know it can be sometimes expensive but really, it’s worth making the time. And there are many organizations that offer these for free to begin with. You can even seek help from other venues. For example, your parish priest, perhaps a mentor at work, trusted friends. There’s no shortage of communities you can work with. But there is no reason for you to go through this cancer experience alone. Even macho men need help. Though they never admit it.

One of the other things I did to cope was to set my priorities. ‘Coz at the time as I’ve said, I was in school. I was working and trying to take care of Jackie all at the same time. And really it was driving me nuts. There was just no way I could balance it all out. So what I did was I made arrangements to put work aside and to put school aside. And this was crucial because at that time, Jackie had already graduated and we were not… getting any money from her financial stipend, kasi graduate na siya. We were living off of my scholarship. Fortunately my school and my work were both very understanding and they continued our financial support even though I was  no longer actively studying or actively working. But I was, I was really… it took me a while to do this. And you know, you’ve, you’ve probably seen that e-mailed story before. That when you’re juggling balls in the air, you just have to really remember, some balls if you drop them, they bounce.  Other balls, you drop them, they shatter. And so it’s important to set our priorities.

The other thing that was really crucial is keeping lines of communication open. And not just any kind of communication. Communication that needed to be honest and compassionate and constant. And this had to involve everyone who are part and parcel of this experience – Jackie and myself of course, but even our family, our friends and our doctors.  ‘Coz so much of acting effectively is dependent on having the right information at the right time. The thing is, as you all know from experience, a lot of the information we sometimes get isn’t always good news. And we sometimes have to try to balance looking at the facts, looking at the figures and conveying this information in a manner that’s compassionate and sensitive. You probably all got to the same point I did and that Jackie did, where at some point we just stopped reading the books, stopped searching the internet, stopped reading at all, reading all the medical reports kasi… at some point sobra na di ba?  But there is a way to convey it. There… and I know I was deeply grateful to the medical team of Jackie ‘coz somehow they were able to strike that amazing balance of honesty and compassion when talking to us about what happened.  Regardless, communication is really the key.  

One of the other things that helped me cope was really the whole tactic of avoiding problems. And as you know there are many along the way when traveling this cancer journey. There were practical concerns like medical and financial matters. Many of which required really a lot of coordination with our medical team or working with our insurance carrier. The harder problems of course were, in my case, dealing with the death of my wife. I know it’s kind of ….A little bit easier to speak about it now … I’m…it’s been about 3 years since Jackie died. But one of the things that I think is important to keep in mind is, when you get to a point that you’re being confronted by a life threatening illness, no one really knows what’s going to happen di ba? There are no guarantees. In fact, you know, the story of course of Mrs. Saguisag who beat cancer only to be killed in a car accident later on. I mean we just don’t really know what’s going to happen. And so again, I would encourage everyone here, the husbands in particular, that it’s important to have those difficult conversations. When we have to talk about practical concerns, when we have to talk about what ifs, when we have to talk about preparing for what might but hopefully not but what might be down the road. It is important to talk about finances, arrangements afterwards because as hard as it is to talk about in the present, they will come back in a harder, more difficult way to manage if we don’t deal with it when they’re just beginning to … surface.

A particular way of coping, which I think many of the caregivers here in the audience tend to take for granted, is taking care of themselves. You know, if there’s the old adage, Physician, heal thyself, then I would add to that Caregiver, care for thyself. The last thing a caregiver wants to do is to make the problem worse by becoming sick himself or herself or by getting burnt out. The fact of the matter is we can’t do it all. In fact, we shouldn’t even attempt to do it all because we’re not always the best person for the job. I think sometimes we feel hesitant to ask for help from family or friends, or people at work kasi nahihiya tayo or whatever. But really that is the one thing we again have to encourage ourselves to do. In our case, what really helped was having family, friends take turns at the hospital making bantay, staying overnight, keeping watch in the chemo room, taking care of tasks. There’s no reason why we won’t be able to find people to help us with this.

So this is an important piece that I’d like to stress. Don’t add to the problem by becoming sick or getting burnt out yourself coz you are only human. We are only human. We do have our limits and we should be aware of that.  

A lesson I learned very quickly on was when I used to long for… I wished I could go back to the way things used to be, I wished I could go back to normal. I learned very early on that past a certain point, in fact you know, as the seconds stick by, there is no more the way things used to be. Di ba? The same goes you can’t set foot into the same river twice. There is no more going back to what is normal. And then you begin to think what’s normal anyway?  Di ba? Normal is what we make of it. Normal is subjective. Normal is relative. So if we begin to accept that there will be days in our lives as we’re traveling this cancer journey, there will be good days and we should be grateful for that. There will be bad days because these things are difficult to deal with and we’ll have to handle them. And there will be those truly ugly and difficult days. Sometimes my major achievement of the day was to get out of bed and brush my teeth and go back to bed. And that was all I did. Sometimes I wasn’t even able to do that. But the sooner we accept this, the sooner we find that we will survive.  

One of the lessons I learned too is that we are really, all of us, each of us, are a lot stronger than we think we are.

The last thing that truly helped me was I was able to find meaningful work, a meaningful engagement to commit myself to while undergoing this journey. Very early on, in fact, soon after Jackie was diagnosed, that’s kind of a side story… Jackie, my father and my father-in-law were all diagnosed with advanced cancer within 6 months of each other. And they all died within a year of each other. So while this was going on with our families, very early on, we were thinking: What can we do to help the cancer community. To help people realize that they don’t need to be alone in facing the challenges of this illness. So early on, Jackie and I together with our families, thought of putting up a cancer support organization. And I know I e-mailed Kara very early on also who so graciously responded with like a multi-paged e-mail of encouragement and support. But doing something, in my case it was this, in your case it will be something else. Doing something that gives meaning to what you’re going through, doing something that gives you a sense of purpose to your experience, will really help you cope. And you’ll… you’ll find, you’ll find out what that thing is. And as you commit yourself to it, I think that’s again speaking for myself, that was one thing that helped me coped. Care Well is something that survives today if any of you find yourselves in Manila, I encourage you to come visit us, and we provide all these different services free of charge. If you have questions, I’ll be staying behind after the session to speak with you.  

So really just in some way, I’d like to end by saying…these lessons that I’ve shared with you, they’re not over. This is really an ongoing process, and kind of the something behind this is we need to trust the process, we need to trust the experience that we’re going through. As has been mentioned many times by Maritoni and others, we have to really understand that somehow, someway the hand of our Lord is behind all these. And there is going to be something positive that can come out of it. We just need to let things go. We need to allow ourselves to go through our grief, to go through the challenges. By the way, you don’t only grieve when someone dies di ba? You grieve even as you’re going through sickness because you grieve the past, you grieve what you were before you were ill. You grieve how things used to be with your wife or with your husband before this illness struck. So grieving is something that starts very early on. And as hard, as hard as it is, we do need to be able to find a way to let it go, let it run its course. So letting go, detachment, not resisting, in the wise, in the wise words of the borg in Star Trek, “Resistance is futile.” Not resisting, giving way and trusting God is something that’s very, very crucial in this area.  

So, my parting words are that take heart, and have faith that you will find your own way of coping. Coping is never perfect. It won’t always work but you will find your own way. It’s a way that will be unique to your particular context, your particular situation. And as you do this, as you find your own way, even if it’s really hard, the Silver Lining is when someone stops you on the street one day, they stop you guys, and they ask, “How did you do it?”  You’ll be able to say…  

Audience:  Moving on with life…

Bobbit:  I won’t say so…  Thank you very much!

Audience clapping