When her doctor told her she needed to start taking holidays, Marlyn found it much easier to take regular respite.

Transcript

The doctor started telling me I had to start taking holidays myself. I couldn’t be thinking about not doing it because I felt guilty or because it was difficult. And the longer a holiday that I take, the more work and preparation and arrangements I have to set in place in order to go away. But the doctor made a point of saying “You need to get away at least every three months.” And that was good to hear because I came back and I said to my husband, “I have to get away every three months.” And he was, “Oh, that much? That often?” And I kind of thought, “Ooh”—guilty. But the fact that it had come from the doctor made me more able to say it without feeling too guilty about it. And I really came to believe that in order to survive this, and not kind of throw up my hands and say, “I can’t deal with this anymore,” I had to be able to do some of the things that I really wanted to do and wasn’t able to do with him anymore. So, I’ve started going off on some other trips—not just visiting my kids but… I went with my brother on a couple of short trips in the past couple of years down south in the winter—just to get away in the winter and just to try and do something that felt normal.

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