We were in the DayWard for a long time. Nurses came in and took bloods for different blood tests. The oncologist came to insert a bladder catheter. They put Paul on bag after bag of fluids. And they put him on antibiotics. I held Paul's hand, stroked his arm, stroked his forehead and spoke to him gently telling him that I loved him, that we were getting help now and that everything would be all right. . He seemed to be…
In this blog post, I am going to share a number of reflections on my grieving process with you.
1. Anticipatory grief.
Shortly after Paul's death, people would say to me that I was now in the early stages of my bereavement. And I realised that that wasn't true. I had been grieving for Paul since the moment we got the diagnosis of liver secondaries.
This phenomenon is called "anticipatory grief".
I cried…
Paul had to go for a further set of scans in early February of 2017. By that time he had been off Chemotherapy for almost five weeks and we were both concerned that the cancer might start to grow again if we didn't continue Chemotherapy soon. One week after the scans we had the appointment with the oncologist.
"The scans are the same as the last scans from November," he informed us.
We were silent. We both…
In my previous blog posts, I have told you about the time when my man was sick, our journey through this very difficult time and the end of his life. In this blog post, I would like to tell you what I feel I have learned from the time when I cared for him. My hope is that some of the things I am going to write will help some of you who are still in the role of a carer and make some things a little easier for you. But…
Before I continue telling our story, I want to share a thought I am really passionate about: Scans for patients with any form of advanced cancer have to be performed every six months. It is not right to only perform scans when the patient has developed symptoms or when specific tumor markers have gone beyond the normal range. Many tumors would be discovered a lot sooner, and in many cases they would be much more treatable…
