My mother is an extremely practical woman. She eats fairly healthily, has done for quite some time, likes to exercise but has always suffered with health issues. Diabetes (type 2), high cholesterol, blood pressure etc. Out of my parents, if you had asked me which one might get cancer, I would have said my father; he has smoked a packet of cigarettes daily since he was 18, with very small spaces of irony ("quitting") in between.
About 2 and a half years ago, I got a phone call while I was walking home from work "I have thyroid cancer"... I didn't quite understand, I knew it wasn't good, what cancer is good? But i knew that maybe it wasn't the worst case scenario. I have experienced family members with cancer my whole life, my grandmother and aunty have lived and died due to various forms of cancer, lung and cervical at the start and then everywhere else at the end. I hoped that, knowing my mother, this would be different.
I got a message from my mum last night saying that she needed to go in for a third surgery on her throat, one that could result in needing a tracheotomy and her losing the ability to speak. The cancer is now also in her lungs but is inoperable so she will need chemotherapy to contain it. She ended the message with "hopefully many years ahead" but this is the first time in the nearly three years that she's lived with it, that I've had a mom who has cancer, that I really feel like she's going to die.
For context I am the youngest out of five siblings at 26 years old. I am unmarried and have no children, although I do have a lovely, 6 month old Boston terrier puppy named Mushroom and an even lovelier, 30 year old, boyfriend named Grant.
It's been on my mind after reading my mums text message that she may not be here to see me get married or to meet my children. For three years I haven't really felt like she would die or that I even had to be worried about it; if you knew my mum, you would know why. She wouldn't just die. Cancer wouldn't just kill my mother. That's just not the way this works. So I've been carrying on like normal. I don't really know what to say to her or how I can help. My brothers and father isolate themselves from it by ignoring the issue all together.
At this point I really feel like I don't know what I can do to help or how I'm supposed to process the fact that she could die. Death is very strange thing and something that I tend not to think about because I'm afraid of what might exist after or what might not...
I'm at a loss and my feelings are all over the place, sometimes I feel everything at all at once but most of the time I don't feel anything at all.
How do you cope with the fact that you might lose your mother? Can you cope with that? I don't know.
Hi Courteney and welcome to our Macmillan family, though always a bit sorry to see a new friend join.
My adventure with cancer has been "interesting" and have been in a position of life and death with my wife too often - though I have come to the conclusion with all she had been through that she is close to indestructible - even her oncologist is amazed.
I am really glad your mother trusts you enough to share the news with you, I would guess she is really concerned about possibly loosing her voice and that may be something very much in front of her mind.
I came really quite close to breaking and then did a living with less stress course, helped me to keep my focus on the now and enjoy what we have rather than worrying about a future I cannot control and letting my imagination create disasters yet to come. Life does like to throw a few curveballs though and the conscious breathing exercises are great for keeping emotions under control while we deal with those. Just sometimes I still cry but then that is simply my love overflowing from my eyes - and that is cool.
What is is easy for us to get caught in is a world of anticipatory grief - very common as we can see in the blog here.
<<hugs>>
Steve
