Shandy Gabayzadeh on Caregiving, Cancer, and Choosing Hope Every Day
Jadu Beauty Podcast ·
From " Devoted Caregiver " to Advocate for Cancer Awareness and Resilience
"People always ask how the patient is doing. They rarely ask the caregiver." It's the line that sits at the center of everything Shandy Gabayzadeh does now and it's why she started doing it. Shandy is an award-winning writer and New York Times contributor whose life changed when her husband, Sean, was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. What followed was years of full-time caregiving, and out of that came a second calling: advocating for cancer awareness, caregiver support, and early screening, and writing about all of it with the kind of honesty that doesn't get talked about publicly very often. Her upcoming memoir, Walking the Days: From Warrior to Woman, chronicles her family's journey through Sean's diagnosis and treatment and the lessons it left them with. You can find more from her on Instagram .
Her advocacy work returns to the same six things, consistently:
- The power of hope and resilience
- Supporting caregivers and families
- Early cancer screening and prevention
- Faith and emotional healing
- The importance of community
- Sharing stories that inspire others
In her own words, hope isn't something that shows up on its own. It's something you choose, on purpose, every single day. Even, and especially, on the days it would be easier not to.
What We Cover in This Episode
"Hope isn't something you find once. It's something you choose every single day."— Shandy Gabayzadeh, Caregiver Advocate & Author of Walking the Days
Caregiving Is Giving Your Life to Help Keep Another Human Alive
Shandy walks through what actually changed the day Sean was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. She goes on to say how caregiving stopped being a word and became a full-time, all-consuming responsibility overnight. She's direct about what the role demands: not just logistics and appointments, but a kind of emotional endurance nobody prepares you for.
She's candid about the fear and uncertainty that came with it, and about how resilience wasn't a trait she already had, it was something the situation forced her to build in real time. That kind of sustained, high-stakes stress doesn't stay contained to the hardest moments. It tends to surface physically, too, in whatever way a body is already primed to show it. For a lot of caregivers, that means tension carried in the scalp, and hair that starts shedding more than usual. If that sounds familiar, Jadu Heal is a pre-wash treatment built for exactly that kind of stress-related scalp tightness. It won't fix what's causing the stress, it's just one less thing to carry while you're carrying everything else.
City of Hope Gave Us More Than Treatment — They Gave Us More Time Together
A major part of the conversation centers on City of Hope, where Sean received care, and the difference it made to have a treatment team that treated the family, not just the diagnosis. Shandy talks about what that kind of support actually looks like from the caregiver's side of the room. Faith, family, and community aren't abstract concepts here. They are the real-world pillars that carried her family through every hardship. She's clear that none of it made the fear disappear, it just gave her somewhere to put it that wasn't alone.
Turning Pain Into Purpose: Advocacy, Writing, and the Memoir That Followed
The conversation closes on how Shandy turned the hardest years of her life into advocacy — for caregivers, for early cancer screening, for the idea that hope is a daily practice and not a one-time feeling. Writing Walking the Days became part of that: a way to process what happened, keep the memories, and hand something useful to the next family walking the same road.
"Even in the hardest moments, we chose to lead with love instead of fear."— Shandy Gabayzadeh
She ends by revisiting her opening observation. Patients are always asked how they're feeling, while caregivers are almost completely overlooked. Naming that gap, she says, is most of what caregiver advocacy actually is.
Related to This Episode
Jadu Heal
Caregiving is one of the most sustained, under-recognized forms of stress there is — and stress shows up on your scalp before almost anywhere else. This is the deeper read on why. Read the full breakdown →
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