Hi everyone,
Three weeks ago, our family received devastating news. My amazing dad has been diagnosed with bladder cancer that has spread to his urethra and lungs. He’s been given a terminal prognosis of up to six months.
My sister and I are both nurses, which somehow makes this even harder. We feel completely useless and absolutely terrified of what’s to come. We understand the process clinically because we see it every day at work, but when it’s your own dad, all that knowledge feels overwhelming rather than helpful. I feel totally lost.
We’re doing our best to support our mum and our other sister, who has severe learning disabilities and additional disabilities. If anyone has experience or advice on how to explain terminal illness and the dying process to someone with severe learning disabilities, we would be incredibly grateful.
I’m also struggling with a lot of anger. My dad is still young, and I always assumed he would be there — which I know sounds silly, but the shock of that future being taken away is unbearable.
I don’t really know what to ask or what I should be doing. I know the process, but emotionally I don’t know how to get through.
Any advice, shared experiences, Thank you for reading.
Hi Nat28
Welcome to our community, I hope you find it both informative and supportive.
Something quite common on here is people coming to realise the importance of looking after ourselves if we want to be helpful to others. I know how close I came to breaking before I first reached out for help. There is quite a good guide on here Your feelings when someone has cancer that I find helpful in being able to recognize the feelings and accept them as normal and valid can help to make them less overwhelming.
My experience of cancer is via my wife who has Leiomyosarcoma, it was incurable at diagnosis but my wife never wanted a prognosis, as a rare form of cancer there would not have been much point in one anyway. Fortunatly for us the chemotherapy managed to render her cancer stable and we have been living with cancer now for over 10 years.For me the key message was take any help on offer - Maggies and Macmillan have both been very helpful.
Our son has autism and so I struggled with lots of books that talked about a cure, we found The Secret C by Julie Stokes quite helpful and I think if helped Michael to work out his feelings too.
It may help you to look at this article on Coping with anticipatory grief too.
<<hugs>>
Steve
