By Rick Madewell
Assistant Editor

Erin Bruneau watched helplessly, her heart breaking, as her husband Bob’s life slipped away on a January day in 2009.

There was nothing more she could do.

For several months previously, Erin had taken care of her husband to the best of her ability. She scheduled doctor appointments, mapped out medication times and kept track of practically everything else in Bob’s life through her fastidious organizing and journaling. Dates, times, memos, who said this and who said that was entered into the planner she carried with her everywhere.

Bob died just six months after being diagnosed with esophageal cancer. He was 46.

Erin, who lives in Kissimmee, looks back on those times with, of course, sadness. But there also is pride. She realizes now that she did the best she possibly could to care for him, and at least something positive has come from her husband’s untimely death.

In the two-and-a-half years since his death, Erin, drawing on her own personal experiences of jotting down as much information as she could while caring for her husband, developed a special planner and guide for those who are faced with similar circumstances and are placed into the scary, often unnerving role, of a caretaker. Oddly enough, when her husband was dying, Erin could find nothing to help guide a caretaker through the final chapter of someone’s life.

The Medical Care Planner, by The Caregivers Guide, of which Erin is president and CEO, is an 8 1/2-by-11-inch spiral notebook planner with laminated covers that contains pages for quick referencing, tracking medicine dosages, contact information, dental treatment, milestones, monthly calendars to record blood pressure, temperature and weight, meal records and notes, travel expenses and three plastic pages to hold up to 48 pertinent business cards. There also are inspiring quotes throughout the planner and some pages with pockets to store important papers. The book is a comprehensive source for anyone being thrust into the challenging role of caretaker.

From her own planner, while taking care of her husband, Erin found a sense of peace a short time after his life ended.

“In the end, it validated me for what I did for him as his caretaker,” Erin said.

Finding out

Some six months earlier, Erin and Bob were eating dinner when Bob suddenly turned pale.

“He looked at me, got up and walked away and came back and said he had a very hard time swallowing,” Erin said.

Bob dismissed it as heartburn, but he soon found out that the acid in his stomach had burned a hole in his esophagus.

Bob was quickly diagnosed with stage 4 esophageal cancer. Had it been stage 1 or even stage 2, Bob could have been a candidate for surgery. Instead, doctors at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center Orlando immediately put him on constant (24 hours) chemotherapy for five straight days every 17 days. They told him, Erin said, “You don’t have any time to wait.”

The doctors’ prognosis: Bob had six months to live.

“That put us in a tailspin,” Erin said.

Their lives changed dramatically within a matter of days. Bob stayed on the chemotherapy while Erin bought a generic 12-month planner to begin tracking anything and everything that dealt with her husband and his affliction. For anyone they met regarding the illness, Erin stapled that person’s business card in the planner.

“The blessing of the whole thing is that even though he was dying, we continued living,” Erin said.

Erin teared up when she recalled what her husband told her a week before he died.

“I want you to promise me you won’t be bitter,” he said to her. “You’re beautiful and you’re going to live and you’re going to love again.”

With that, Erin said, “I probably got one of the best gifts anyone in this situation could have been given.”

Two days before he died, Bob, slipping in and out of consciousness, grabbed Erin’s hand and said, “If it wasn’t for you I would have been dead a long time ago.”

Before Bob died, the couple had just celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary.

Getting the planner

Erin said she would like to see the planner she put together in as many facilities as possible that deal with diabetes, cancer and chronic illnesses.

“It’s not important for people to know that I did it, but that it gets out there,” she said. “A big key to the planner is that it’s not dated,” she said. “It starts when they do.”

Erin’s planner is available from her website at www.thecaregiversguideinc.com. Cost for the planner, which is about 160 pages, is $29.95.