Wife Slips Into Madness As Husband Dies of Brain Tumor - Yahoo!

Wife Slips Into Madness As Husband Dies of Brain Tumor - Yahoo!

Excerpt:

[This 'headline is SHAMEFUL and INSULTING to people who take care of the people they love. The real madness is the total lack of support from people around them from the Church, family and medical profession. About the only 'attention' given is all about the 'making money' people. Once the pot is dry even the medical professionals most often disappear. She isn't mad she's an 'exhausted soldier' in the trenches of family and love who had to quickly face the cold, harsh reality around her. Catherine is a true 'heroine' to me and deserves a medal and everything else that's good!]

....just a few years into their new marriage, John Graves showed signs of having an affair. He seemed to lose interest in his wife, squandered company money and disappeared for hours at night.

Catherine Graves, now 45, even hired a private detective. But it wasn't another woman who was the problem -- it was an aggressive and fatal brain tumor that had slowly caused personality changes and eventually killed her husband of only five years.

"I faced a harsh reality," she said. "I thought I would be spending the rest of my life with him."

Graves said the crumbling marriage and then the exhausting care-giving that followed also caused her to lose her mind, a phenomenon that is all too common when family members are left without support to care for sick and dying loved ones...

...heir business crumbled with the economic downturn and their inability to work.

"I didn't leave the house for six months," she said. "I was homebound and had no interaction with other people."

Even the medical professionals had little sympathy, she said.

"It was so about the patient -- there was nothing for me," she said.

"I held together really well," Graves said. "People commented that I was doing such a great job."

But after he died, she never dealt with the grief and plunged forward on "autopilot," even dating. Eventually the stress of caregiving hit her.

"I crashed," said Graves, who eventually sought counseling and was put in an intensive outpatient treatment program.

She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress and dissociative disorder.

"I check out mentally," she said. "On the outside I looked normal, but I was so disconnected and far away. ... I had alienated myself from everyone, even from myself."

Care-giving experts like Lynn Feinberg of AARP say that caregiver stress is a "huge issue."