Hi guys,
I'm new to the site and thought that writing the blog may help me to sort out some of the feelings i have these days.....you see my dad has been diagnosed with bladder cancer, it probably sounds strange to people but i can't really remember when it became an official diagnosis, it feels like a lifetime ago when in reality it's only a couple of months, i apologise for the long post but there's a lot of background to this.
He'd been having problems for a long time and unfortunately he left it a long time before he went to get it checked; and then to make it worse they didn't really investigate until it got a lot worse. They eventually sent him for a cystoscopy where they saw the tumour, they then did a biopsy with general aneasthetic. The day after they told him it was definitely cancer and they had to wait for the biopsy results to find out how aggressive it was. The biopsy results came back a week and a half later and it is quite an aggressive form, in fact so aggressive that they said they would have to do a ct scan before any treatment as if it had spread at all then there would be nothing they could do. It took just under 2 weeks to do the ct and get the results, these showed that there is a small tumour in the chest cavity but because they don't know whether it is the same cancer or not, they were willing to try 3 lots of chemo. This will last for 9 weeks and if it shrinks the tumour in his chest, then they will do the bladder removal op, if it doesn't then they say there is nothing else they can do.
Well, it's now 2 weeks into the treatment and it's just so strange, he was having problems before but he never seemed ill, but now after his first lot of treatment, he looks ill and it's scary. My brother and sister still live at home with my parents and they're both really struggling to deal with this all. My sister is only 12 and she's just terrified her dad is going to die, my mum didn't want to tell her much to avoid scaring her but she's very smart and figured out what was happening so we told her everything as she was imagining a lot worse, she's coping well for such a young girl and also now has a counsellor at school that she can talk to which is helping and my brother....well....he's 25 and not coping with this at all, he's just as scared and was coping by drinking, however he had a little meltdown the other day, he cried over us all, told us he didn't want dad to die and couldn't cope with this. We tried to tell him we were all feeling the same and the best thing to do is to be honest with mum and dad, tell them what he's feeling and deal with it together but we don't know if it worked or not, i guess only time will tell.
As for me, despite what i said to my brother, i don't know how i'm feeling, I haven't cried, yelled, done any of the things i would think of as normal in this situation, i've been trying to keep positive and think of all the practical things that need doing and sorting, i feel almost detached from it all. My mum told my brother last week that we'd all had a day like that, where we cried,shouted etc but i haven't. The day he got the ct results my little sister stayed with me as she didn't want to go to school, we spent the day playing games on the wii, cooking cakes, just having fun and that to me seemed almost wrong. My fiance and i have also now pulled our wedding forward as i don't want to risk my dad not being there and i've learnt that life is too short to wait but even planning my wedding seems strange, not quite wrong or sad but odd.
I don't know how to feel, what to do or say and in some ways how to help, all i can see is the devastating effect this is having on my family and i can't do a damn thing to stop it, all we can do is sit and wait for the next ct results and pray that the chemo has shrunk his tumour and they don't give up.
