The Folder
When my husband was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, we were handed a binder. We needed a way to manage our lives.
For six months, he had been having symptoms. We had seen the physician several times. They ran tests and thought it was hemorrhoids. When the symptoms continued, we scheduled a colonoscopy. Coleman was 36. The girls were 1, 4, and 7.
We were standing by the window downstairs when the oncologist called. Our three girls were upstairs playing with Grandma. The biopsy results and scans were back—stage 4 colon cancer with metastasis to the liver.
Coleman collapsed into his favorite chair. I could see the shock, fear, and profound sadness on his face. We sat and cried together, not knowing what to do.
Then came the binder
At our first oncology appointment, we started discussing a care plan. They gave us a giant binder filled with information.
We tried to absorb as much as we could. There was a lot.
Chemotherapy appointments. Lab draws. More testing and scans. Consultations with other physicians. Medications. Insurance information. Instructions we needed to remember while we were still trying to understand what had happened to our family.
And we still had three little girls who needed us.
Family members were stepping in to help, but they needed to know when we would be gone for appointments, who was watching the kids, and what was happening with his treatment. We needed a way to share information without passing a giant binder between people.
Coleman was a mechanical engineer. I was an ICU nurse. We were both used to working through complicated problems, so we started building a system.
We used Google tools to keep a shared medical calendar and a running record of appointments, treatments, and procedures. We kept an updated medication list, a running medical timeline, and digital copies of all scans, biopsy results, and labs.
It had to be something we could keep up with. Something we could share. And something I could pull up on my phone.
We would need it sooner than either of us expected.
I was a nurse. This was my husband.
Early in treatment, Coleman had a rare reaction to one of the chemotherapy drugs. He developed coronary spasms and collapsed at home.
My mother-in-law called 911. In a terrifying moment, I had to send my 7-year-old next door to find help while I stayed with him.
I had cared for critically ill patients. I knew how to check his breathing and pulse. But knowing what to do didn’t stop me from being terrified.
That is something I want people to understand about caregiving: you can be capable and still be scared. You can understand the medical language and still struggle to answer a question when the person you love is in trouble.
The emergency team needs his history. What treatment did he receive? Which medications is he taking? Who are his doctors?
In that moment, you are trying to answer the emergency room staff's questions while also being terrified, and your brain shuts down. With all our documents already on my phone, I was able to quickly email them to the ER nurse, print them, and have them in his chart within minutes. This saved me and my husband's mental energy for what mattered most: making sure he got the care he needed.
Through the years of ER visits that followed, it was tremendously helpful to pull up any record the hospital staff needed from my phone. There were visits when Coleman was shaking with fever, exhausted, and in pain. Having to repeat his medical history frustrated him. He felt awful, and the questions kept coming.
I was so thankful I could hand that part over, which sped up his care and prevented unnecessary medical tests.
The information was there. He didn’t have to struggle through every detail, and I didn’t have to hunt through a binder or several patient portals.
I could focus on Coleman.
What I help families put in place
Keeping those records updated was work. I won’t pretend it wasn’t. But it made an enormous difference when we needed them.
This is part of what I now help patients and caregivers do through Back Pocket Caregiver: create a practical system for the information and coordination that come with serious illness.
We start with a few things:
A shared calendar
A current medication and physician list
A running treatment timeline
A clear place for important documents
The system has to fit your family. It has to make sense to the people helping you, and it has to be manageable on a week when nobody has much energy left.
I know how overwhelming that first pile of information can feel. I also know how useful it is to have someone help you work through it, decide what needs attention, and get it into a form you can actually use.
That’s what I offer: my experience as an ICU nurse and as a wife who spent years managing care for someone she loved.
If you’re looking at a binder, a stack of papers, or a phone full of portal messages and wondering where to start, we can start there together.
Back Pocket Caregiver offers a free 30-minute introductory conversation about what you’re managing and where you could use support.