My Mum has been given conflicting information about her condition; her GP rang her to say her cancer has spread but the hospital consultant has told Mum to ignore the doctor. She doesn't know what to think but if it has spread she doesn't want more chemotherapy with no hope of getting better. She's really struggling with the whole business as she's never ill and at 85 was still digging the garden, making bread, and generally being on the go the whole time before this. I don't know how to help her.
Hi , welcome to the community though so sorry to hear about your mum.
Do you or someone else go with her to the oncology appointments, it can be helpful to have another set of ears and someone who might think of some other questions as otherwise it is easy to miss things.
Chemotherapy is quite a big thing and the oncology team would hopefully be happy to discuss both risks and benefits.
It sounds like your mother is generally quite strong from what you say. I know with my wife the chemotherapy was not too bad except for a couple of bouts of fever where she ended up in hospital - which she hated. For us the treatment rendered her cancer as stable and we have been living with cancer now for 6 years.
For me I was struggling until I did a living with less stress course with Maggies and then found Macmillan. It can be really hard dealing with our own emotions at these times and it can be quite difficult to help those we love, you might find some of the information in Looking after someone with cancer helpful.
<<hugs>>
Steve
Hi @clk123, Janice is my wife rather than mother though we do have a now 15 year old son.
She went through two different rounds of chemotherapy, the first was fairly effective but had a issue in that it caused a weakness in her lung that caused it to collapse. They managed to fix that though and then the second chemotherapy caused fairly few side effects and seems to have stopped the cancer growing. The oncologist is so pleased she only now gets monitored every nine months. She is in really good health, we walked 2 miles across town today to an interview for our sons admission to further education college and back.
One of the issues of course is that nobody can be sure how any individual will react to any treatment and of course deciding not to do treatment might be the best option. The only thing anyone can do is get as much information as possible and then make a decision knowing that we have taken the best choice in our situation.
<<hugs>>
Steve
