My Nan.
Firstly, I am sorry for the long story, I feel it might help to just write all this down as I can't seem to get it all out verbally.
My nan has been through breast cancer. At her age she was offered limited treatment as they thought she would not cope with it. We told them that she would cope. She is very strong. She had everything they offered and survived. Things were good for 2 years.
In November she had a fall and broke her Femur. She had surgery and after some recovery time she came home. She had an appointment booked for Physio and we found out that she never went. At the time she said she did not need it. Now we know that she could not face it as she was in pain. She then went to have a check up of the break and they said it had not healed properly. More time needed.
Over the past 2-3 months her mobility went way down hill. We did constant calls to doctors and they came to assess her. They told us that they don't know what is causing the issues and gave her steroids and antibiotics. This didn't work. A week later she was even worse and we were so concerned for her safety that we called 111 in an attempt to get someone to take our concerns seriously. They arranged for an assessment to be done to evaluate care. Knowing that she was not going to like this, I rushed to her house to be there when they called. I was too late and she had had another fall.
She went into hospital and we were all called in to say goodbye? ? (We later found out that she had sepsis). I stayed with her the night and she was loads better by the morning following more antibiotics. Things were looking up again, until the doctor told us that she had dark spots in her brain. Since then we have more results. She has bone cancer as a secondary from the breast cancer. and it is everywhere.
Latest update is that the original prognosis of 10 months is now weeks and days. I am just so confused, upset and I just don't know what else I am feeling anymore. I guess I should feel angry with the questions which I have in my head but the pain is overriding the anger.
On top of all this, my grandad has been told he needs a bone scan following bad test results for Prostate. Surely this is not going to be the same outcome? I am not sure what to expect in the new few weeks, I know each case is different.
Trying to keep them both positive while I am falling apart is exhausting. Again, sorry for the long post I just needed to get it out somehow.
Thanks x
Hi Milly87 and welcome to our community though really sorry to hear about what you and your family are going through.
Sepsis is very serious - at one point my wife ended up in intensive care and was given a 50-50 chance of survival and is incredibly fast acting - rather unlike most cancers.
Unfortunately a prognosis is at best a guess based on averages - my wife never wanted one and I really struggled with that but now 6 years down the line her cancer is stable and as far as we can tell she will keep going for quite a few years yet.
It is so easy to go down the route of "what if" but no matter what it will not make a single difference to where you are now. One of the problems of course is that doctors are often very over worked but are expected to always have all the answers. I sometimes think it is called "practicing medicine" for a reason.
If we look at Your feelings when someone has cancer we can see all the emotions you talk about are part of our world, however by recognizing where we are it can be helpful to deal with these.
I am glad you found talking on here useful, sometimes writing down our thoughts to a complete stranger can be really helpful and working out how to write something can help us focus on both where we are and where we might like to be. I do hope you post again because on here someone is always listening.
<<hugs>>
Steve
