So, there we were, our daughter 'E' back at school and after a CT scan showing no cancer present, it seemed that E's problems were all under control.
'E' went back to school, half heartedly but she tried to get on with it. After a while it became apparent that 'E' needed some psychological help. Well who wouldn't at 15 dealing with cancer. After some counselling session, things seemed to be returning to normal, well as normal as things can be with the 3 monthly check ups and CT scans.
Myself and my husband decided to give 'E' something to look forward to, to distract her from thinking about check ups, as these were becoming her main focus, expecting bad news every time we were going for CT results.
All four of us sat down one evening and I said to 'E' that we needed to do something to celebrate the fact that she was a survivor. I told her to choose a holiday destination for us and we would save up and go. 'E' said that's easy, I want to go to New York. Great! I thought, how am I going to save enough for that. But I said ok that's where we will go then. Later when me and my husband were on our own, I said that I wasn't sure we could afford that, he said for just me and the girls to go as it didn't appeal to him anyway.
The long and the short of it was that in the end just me and 'E' went to New York the following year in the April of 2014, just before 'E' GCSE's, which she had worked so hard to catch up with. 'E' didn't hold out much hope in passing the GCSE's as she had missed so much. We had the most amazing 9 days in the big apple and made some fantastic memories. We bought so much back for my husband and eldest daughter because we felt so bad about them not being with us.
When we came back 'E' settled back into school and sat her GCSE's and to everyone's amazement, when the results came through in August, 'E' had passed all 9 with even one A. There were a few tears of course. She is an amazing young lady.
It's now 4 years clear of cancer in March of this year.
Unfortunately cancer struck our family again, this time in my elderly father in law. He was diagnosed with throat cancer in late 2014. After the removal of his tumour and voice box he seemed to be winning. Early in 2015 our next victim surfaced with my brother in law who had a rather large lesion removed with a large part of his liver, he seemed to be recovering well. Then in October of 2015 my husband started to complain about waking to often during the night to urinate.
My husband visited our GP sometime around 2014 complaining that he was waking at night to urinate, he was told that at his age he needed to stop drinking fluids after 7pm!! He was 57.
We had a family holiday booked to Cyprus in Oct/Nov 2015 during this holiday it became apparent that there was something definitely wrong with my husbands waterworks. As soon as we returned from the holiday he went straight to the doctors and they diagnosed a urinary tract infection and prescribed antibiotics for 5 days. His symptoms got worse so after 5 days he went back and was given stronger antibiotics. Another 5 days passed but there was no relief. Due to my husband having health insurance with his job he was referred to a private urologist who did a CT scan. The results were devastating, my husband had a rather large tumour in his bladder which had already breached the muscle and there was signs of it being in the lymph nodes in the groin. At the same time we were told that his Dad had taken a turn for the worse, because of this we decided we would not to tell his Dad about his diagnosis.
On boxing day of 2015 my father in law lost his battle with cancer.
