Even though May is National Women’s Healthcare Month, the subject deserves ongoing attention for moms caring for a child battling cancer; it needs highlighting all year long. June is another excellent opportunity to encourage all moms caring for their child battling cancer to make their health a top priority.

Children take a lot of time and care, as do spouses. Being a mother is a sacrificial, thankless role. Today’s moms often work, as well as take care of the home and children. Even in normal circumstances, this is a big responsibility. Mothers are superheroes, and it’s in their nature to prioritize children and spouses over themselves. Unfortunately, health is a significant factor that most women ignore, especially when life gets complicated.

Cancer and Caregiving

Being a caregiver and taking a child through cancer exponentially multiplies a mother’s everyday tasks and responsibilities. Children who deal with that much pain and physical incapacitation can’t do many things for themselves. That puts a lot of pressure on a caregiving mother to fill the gaps. Inevitably, that leaves less time in the day for their own health or activities and responsibilities that don’t involve their sick child.

For any person, part of a healthy lifestyle involves self-care: exercising, healthy eating, doctor checks, etc.. Those are things that caregiving mothers simply leave unattended because they don’t have time. As such, many women come out the other side of their child’s or spouse’s battle with cancer in a compromised physical state themselves. Poor health can manifest in many ways: weight gain, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, depression, and many other conditions.

Women’s Health Conditions

Women’s health conditions can be effectively treated with early detection through regular medical checkups. You can’t effectively treat these conditions if you aren’t going to the necessary checkups to detect them. What comes to mind when you think about women’s health concerns? Breast cancer probably tops the list. But staying healthy as a woman involves more than breast exams and mammograms. Just as your life has many facets, so does your health. Luckily, many of women’s top health concerns are preventable conditions. Keep these key conditions on your radar and find out what can be done to prevent them.

1. Heart Disease: Your mom may have told you to guard your heart. She was wise, but maybe not in the way you think. More than one in three American women have some form of cardiovascular or heart disease.
2. Cancer: Once again, breast cancer tops the list when you think about women and cancer. And breast cancer is definitely a top health concern for women. But did you know skin cancer is the most common cancer in the United States? What’s more: Lung, colon, and uterine cancers combined account for almost as many cancers as breast cancer.
3. Depression: We all get the blues from time to time. But depression is more than that. Depression lasts for more than a couple of weeks and interferes with your daily life. And it’s almost twice as likely to affect women compared to men.
4. Autoimmune Diseases: Autoimmune diseases occur when your immune system goes haywire and attacks healthy tissues. There are a wide variety of these diseases that affect nearly every organ system. And 75% of the time, they affect women. In fact, approximately 30 million women in America suffer from an autoimmune disease.
5. Diabetes and Obesity: Type 2 diabetes is an epidemic in the United States, affecting nearly 26 million adults. And almost half of these cases are women.
6. Sexual and Bladder Health: Sexual health can go hand-in-hand with bladder health. Infections are a concern, both sexually transmitted diseases and urinary tract infections. But so are functional problems, such as urinary incontinence and sexual difficulties. Bladder problems are known to worsen sexual problems if you are self-conscious or embarrassed.
7. Stroke: Every 40 seconds, someone in the United States suffers a stroke. And every four minutes, a person dies as a result. You should know 60% of these deaths occur in women.

Relief is in Sight for Mothers of Cancer Kids

Here To Serve mobilizes people within online care communities to help alleviate daily responsibilities at home for caregiving mothers. This helps mothers and wives give their own health much-needed attention. Encouraging caregivers to take time and care for themselves is a fruitless endeavor unless responsibilities that fall on women are alleviated. Care communities take over responsibilities that inundate most caregiving mothers to the point of neglecting themselves. Relieving stress and is the best promotion for women’s healthcare.

Not having to make meals, take healthy kids to school or sports practice, do laundry, etc., leaves time for a caregiver to go to their own health checkups and exercise. Knowing that they have a community supporting them in helpful and practical ways, also gives a caregiving mother the motivation and encouragement to take care of herself.

We live in a society with many social media warriors. Many people say they are a champion for this and a supporter of that. It is time for people to walk their talk in ways to provide solutions for these causes. Here To Serve’s mission is to provide practical support and mobilize people whose actions speak more about their advocacy than their words do. Their encouragement to the world is to champion women’s health for a mother caring for her child or husband with cancer.

By Bryan Quintas