Who would you say gave you the most support as you went through?
I think the family is the main support that you have. They’re there, [my wife] was my rock, really, you know, and… if I felt down then she’d pull me up and I think what happens when you… what she said before is that if she felt down, she’d go away from me and maybe to a friend’s house and outpour, so that it wouldn’t affect me. But obviously I had her and I had my other members of the family that I could speak to as well, so they were the main support, the closest support, and you’ve got friends as well round you, but I think the… the specialists that I had to speak to and the nurse, breast care nurse, were very good, because I could speak to them whenever I wanted to and my oncologist, I even text him things and he’d come back to me and, you know… you know, I don’t know how often that happens elsewhere but I thought that was really good that he would have the time to do that.
What sort of things, can you give me examples of what sort of things that [your wife] was doing to help support you?
I think it was a case of… making me feel positive all the time and being… not being, sort of down around me. Keeping the house happy. Keeping the house upbeat, that was a good thing. Her helping me with all the looking into stuff and she would print stuff off for me as well from the websites and give it to me and “look, read this, look at this”, this sort of thing, so that helped and she helped with the, as I said, with the e-mails and the contacting the people when I was trying to go through the Herceptin, trying to get the Herceptin process, so that triggered a lot of other things in terms of getting the media involved and I don’t think probably would have had so much coverage hadn’t it been for [my wife], cos she e-mailed sort of various people and then some came back to her, so that was really good.
