The Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation

HOME ALONE

Home Alone: Here’s how one caring giver deals with life on the home front alone as the kids go back to school, and her husband’s cancer stabilizes and he returns to work. Read how Alissa heals the back-to-school blues

Left to Right: Danny, Ben, Alissa, Gabe, and Joey at the Grand Canyon

By Lori Hope

“My guy’s awake!” proclaims Alissa Robinow as her 11-year-old, Gabe, enters the kitchen. It’s just after noon, and Alissa sounds like any mom lovingly indulging her son during the final lazy days of summer.

“We all went to the movies last night,” she says. Her husband Joey and 13-year-old son, Danny, saw “Superbad,” while she, Gabe, and her 6-year-old, Ben, opted for the more age-appropriate “Brats.”

I sense some sadness in Alissa’s voice as she sighs, “Well, I got to go feed them.” I imagine it’s not because she has to drop what she’s doing to meet Gabe’s needs, but because she won’t be able to do so for much longer, at least not at noon on a weekday.

It’s a bittersweet time of year for many of us whose children are about to relinquish their coveted summertime freedom. But for Alissa, it is especially hard. Her husband — a physician who never smoked — has advanced lung cancer. Diagnosed almost two years ago, Joey’s condition has been stable for many months, thanks to the medication, Tarceva. The summer has provided a much-needed respite for both him and his wife.

“It’s been great,” says Alissa. “We went to family camp for a month.” At camp, the focus was on the children, which took her and Joey’s minds off cancer. “You know how kids are – their needs are all-important to them. When Joey’s at work, everyone’s aware of what we’re going through, but at camp, it wasn’t about him at all, it was about the kids.

Joey’s back at work now, and although his most recent CT scan shows a slight progression of his disease, Alissa says “he’s the king of denial.”

She says that with an affectionate laugh, but again, a diaphanous veil of sadness cloaks her levity. “I had a couple of bad days after getting the news, but it’s just a reminder.” A pause. “It’s just a minor progression.”

Alissa’s optimism is characteristic of her sunny demeanor, which I encountered for the first time about a year ago when we met at a presentation in San Francisco by Katie Couric, who was about to take the anchor chair at CBS. I was covering the event as a journalist; Alissa was there as an activist, hoping to raise a question about the dearth of funding for lung cancer research. A lung cancer survivor myself, I was hoping to land an interview with Couric, during which I would of course suggest she do a story about lung cancer, the nation’s biggest cancer killer, which is painfully stigmatized because of its association with smoking – even though cigarettes are horribly addicting and up to one-fifth of lung cancers occur in people who never smoked. Plus, 90 percent of people who do or did smoke took up the habit when they were teens, before the judgment centers in their brains were fully developed.

Though Alissa and my differences number more than our similarities – my cancer was discovered early and by mistake, and I am the cancer survivor, not the caregiver – we made a strong connection and have stayed in touch. As I was thinking about a back-to-school story that could help people, I thought of Alissa, knowing she would share a message of hope and healing.

She and her family will take one more trip this summer. “Being with the kids so much is so nice, it’s what gets me through every day,” says Alissa. “When you’re with them you have to focus on them and understand what their mindset is. You try to make sure life is as normal as possible. You just have to be in the moment, like they are.”

I ask what keeps Alissa going when she’s not in the moment — when she worries.

“I just keep busy,” she says. “You have to make sure there’s food in the house that everyone’s shoes fit.” She also reads and spends a lot of time with her girlfriends.

And that, she says, is what has really kept her going, even a year and a half after Joey’s diagnosis: her friends, including her neighbors and members of her religious community.

“Everybody has always been there,” she says. “When they don’t hear from me for a few days, they’ll call. They’re always offering to do something.”

Something specific, which is, according to my and others’ research, what people want and need most. Nonspecific offers of help put the onus on the caregiver or ill person, who may be too overwhelmed to think about what they really need.

Alissa loves the offers of help that are constantly flowing in. Like offers to drive her and Joey’s children around. Ben, Gabe, and Joey attend three different schools, so “our friends always want to help with carpooling. They’re great about offering to take the kids with them when they’re going someplace fun. And if someone’s at a store they’ll call and say, ‘I’m here, can I bring you something?’”

As the school year approaches, Alissa realizes there will be old and new temptations her children will have to watch out for. She will reiterate to her older kids the extra warnings she has already delivered about dangerous behaviors that could take a bigger toll on them than on other children. “We tell them, your dad has cancer, so you have a greater likelihood of getting cancer in your life, and smoking can cause it.’

“We talk about the long-term consequences. We have a pretty healthy family relationship.”

Alissa has channeled much of her infectious energy not only into her relationship with her husband and children, but also into making a difference for others who are fighting cancer, especially lung cancer. In September, she’s putting on her second annual golf fundraiser, Golf Fore a Cure. This year it will raise money to fund research through the Bonnie Addario Lung Cancer Foundation. Last year’s tournament raised $25,000 for the Lung Cancer Alliance.

“It’s really the one positive thing I’m able to do,” says Alissa, matter-of-factly.

Golf for Awareness will not only helpful for those of us who’ve been diagnosed with lung cancer; it will also help her cope with the back-to-school blues. She will not only stay busy – and become much busier in the weeks to come – she will keep her focus on others. My hope is that she will also make time to take special care of herself.

As summer winds down and change swirls like the warm winds that will soon start to blow leaves from the trees, we would all do well to think about the positive things we’re able to do for ourselves and for one another to heal the back-to-school blues. Whether it’s calling up a friend and offering to take her child to a movie, picking up extra groceries for a sick neighbor, or making an appointment for that long-overdue massage that you know you need and deserve, it’s what we must do.

Because, in fact, our loving actions — towards ourselves and others – and our hope, faith, and sense of gratitude are really the only things that carry us through the dark times and back into the bright warm light of the season.

Lori Hope is a lung cancer survivor, executive board member of the Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation, writer and editor at CarePages.com, and author of “Help Me Live: 20 Things People with Cancer Want You to Know.” For more information, see www.LoriHope.com