What Are Common Emotional Issues CAR T-Cell Therapy Care Partners Face?
What Are Common Emotional Issues CAR T-Cell Therapy Care Partners Face? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
What are common emotional challenges that care partners of CAR T-cell therapy patients face? Social worker Marc Paloma explains common difficulties and advice for managing emotions. Marc Paloma is an outpatient hematology/oncology clinic social worker at University of Chicago Medicine.
See More from The Care Partner Toolkit: CAR T-Cell Therapy
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How Can a Social Worker Help CAR T-Cell Therapy Care Partners? |
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Transcript:
Katherine Banwell:
Being a care partner can be emotionally and physically draining, so what are some common emotional issues that they face?
Marc Paloma:
I would say from my experience, a lot of care partners as they’re going along through the process, it’s if people have questions about their competency as the care partner. Am I not doing enough to support the patient? Am I doing something wrong? Is there something I can be doing better? Or am I maybe hovering too much?
Katherine Banwell:
Yeah.
Marc Paloma:
Am I overcaring or something in some way? And so those are some things. I also tell the care partners that it’s okay to acknowledge that they have needs as the caregiver.
And they can even say things out loud to their support people of what I’m doing can be a very tough job, and there are challenges to it. And at the same time, then also trying to not feel guilty about having those feelings of saying maybe sometimes I’m having a rough time. So, yeah, it can be, right, very, especially emotionially, emotionally taxing I think for the care partners. So, I think also just one other thing I would add.
One other I think emotionally very difficult part I think which is something that often I think goes unsaid, although I’m hoping it doesn’t go unsaid with the care partners that I work with, is that care partners and patients everybody has that nagging question, that dreaded feeling of what happens if this CAR T process does not work? What if my loved one passes away? So, it all for all of those – all those reasons, am I doing it right? Am I doing it wrong? Am I doing too much?
What if this doesn’t – all of those things just make it a very emotionally taxing process for the patient and also for the care partner as well.
