My mum's melanoma progressed to stage 4 in October last year and we were told she had 3 to 6 months to live without treatment, October and November were incredibly hard, and I really struggled with anticipatory grief. I live at home with my parents still and I'm disabled, pretty much housebound, so my mum and I are really close and spend most of our time together. In December it was like a miracle happened and she improved dramatically, going back to her old self. Then we got the results of her scans on Monday to say the treatment had worked and all the many, many tumours in her body had reduced, even the three in her brain.
Then today, out of nowhere, Mum went for a check up, thinking she had a cold. They gave her an MRI, and now they're saying there's a new tumour in her brain. It's such an enormous shock, and we hadn't even had time to celebrate the good scans. Now we have no idea what this means in terms of treatment, if its stopped working or not. It feels like it must be a terrible mistake. Surely the immunotherapy can't stop working that suddenly.
Now my head is a complete mess. I can't stop crying, and I've gone from thinking my amazing mum might be with us for years at the start of the week, to feeling like she might die fairly imminently.
I dont know what to do or how to cope with this. Its so unrelenting.
Hi Pip93
Shock is perhaps the most common reaction of all when we get any cancer diagnosis and of course any negative feedback as our loved ones go through treatment. Perhaps one of the positives here is that they found something that may have been too small to see earlier and given the treatment she was having seemed to be working.
Sometimes people ask me how I cope, the best answer I have is probably when were we given a choice. The other practical element might be somehow we have managed to survive everything that has been thrown at us so far. So glad we have this forum though because sometimes it really helps to reach out to someone who understands how hard the journey can be.
<<hugs>>
Steve
