Hi all, this is my first time posting. I don’t have cancer but we recently found out my grandad has.
He has it in several places, including 2 large sarcomas. I saw one of them for the first time today and I can’t get the image out of my head. I don’t know why it’s hit me so hard seeing it. I guess you usually think of cancer of this thing inside the body out of sight, but this thing was there loud and proud sticking out of his side clear as day. It was awful.
This, along with his apparent naivety about his prognosis is absolutely heart breaking. 9 months ago, he was chasing my kids around the garden, going on 3 mile walks with a walking group, going to watch the football every other weekend, etc etc, now he can barely walk, struggled to even sit up in bed today.
No questions really, I just wanted to write this down somewhere where people might understand. I don’t feel I can talk about it to anyone around me in this way
Hi Cayleyfc2e79
Welcome to our community, I hope you find it both informative and supportive.
I am Steve one of the community champions and my experience of cancer is via my wife who has Leiomyosarcoma, fortunatly for us her cancer while incurable has been stable for quite a number of years.
You are probably aware that sarcoma is quite a rare type of cancer and as such there as well as the information on here there is also another charity Sarcoma UK that focuses on this.
Something I found quite useful was Your feelings when someone has cancer as being able to recognize the emotions and accept them as part of the new normal can help to make them feel less overwhelming.
Our son was about 9 when my wife was diagnosed. We knew it was not curable and that was quite a struggle but we both agreed to be open with him. We found talking to children and tennagers quite helpful.
Hope some of that helps and of course perhaps that feeling to being less alone I find really helpful.
<<hugs>>
Steve
Hi Cayleyfc2e79
A difficulty with working out a prognosis for sarcoma is that being rare there is really not that much information to make meaningful statistics and that may well be why the doctors cannot really say how long.
There is some limited information on the cancer research website here but as they note "no one can tell you exactly how long you will live".
<<hugs>>
Steve
