Hi everyone, apologies in advance for what will be a long post. I’m new here. My brother was diagnosed in March with terminal bowel cancer and as he is single I’m his next of kin and carer. It’s been a bit of a roller coaster ride as everyone going through cancer says, but I’m struggling to take it all in, so hope you don’t mind if I offload a bit on here.
My brother is 69 and has been a fit and healthy person all of his life and even a couple of weeks before the diagnosis he was moving railway sleepers around in my garden single handed. In mid February he started to feel breathless and looked the colour of putty. He had an annual review due with the nurse at the GP surgery and booked a call in with the GP just before it to mention the other symptoms. The GP told him he’d get the nurse to take some extra bloods and would send him up to A&E for a chest x-ray. When we got to A&E they were horrified at the GP and promptly kept him in for four days. He was severely anaemic, so received a blood transfusion and an iron infusion. He also had a camera down into his stomach which at the time they said was clear. He was released on the Thursday and was called in on the following Sunday for a colonoscopy. I was called after the procedure and asked to come and collect him. When I arrived at the hospital they asked me to come through to the room he was in and the doctor would come and speak to us. I knew then it wasn’t good news. The ‘room’ was a store cupboard and there was my poor brother sitting amongst boxes of PPE items waiting for a doctor to come and speak to us.
When the doctor arrived he told us that he had found something and that he was 99% certain it was cancer. We were sent off home with a Macmillan leaflet and news that things would ‘move fast now’. We then met with the consultant on the following Friday who told us that the tumour was in the colon, it had spread to the wall of the stomach, there are nodules on his liver and his lymph glands are enlarged. Surgery is not an option but he would hand us over to the oncologist who would look to give him chemo.
the following Friday we met with the oncologist who pulled no punches and said, we can do three things
1. Nothing, in which case you may live to summer
2. Give you medium chemo
3. Give you aggressive chemo.
as the cancer is aggressive form, he suggested he go for the aggressive chemo, but he emphasised that he was treating my brother and not the cancer as the cancer is going to win.
talk about punch to the stomach. I know that they can’t sugar coat things but this was like being hit by a train.
My brother has gone foe the aggressive chemo, and his first session was five weeks ago- it went really well, no real side affects and I was feeling quite good about it. The second session was a different ball game. He’d barely been home two hours and his temperature was over 38, so after calling the helpline we took him back into A&E and he was in for another three days. They couldn’t find infection, so thought it was a reaction to the chemo. Since then his bowel movements have become frequent to say the least and he moves between tablets to relieve constipation and tablets to relieve diarrhoea. His energy levels are all over and he’s gone from being a very active person to one who just sits in a chair and watches tv or sleeps. The oncologist had said the chemo was to give him a better quality of life, but at the moment I don’t see any improvement at all.
He’s back into today for session three and it’s already over running, and when I called him to check he was ok he told me there’s too much to tell me on the phone, so of course I’m now panicking that something’s wrong.
I’m trying hard to find positives in all of this and I must admit I’m struggling. I’m feeling guilty if I try to do anything on a personal level re my own life and it’s hard to switch off if I do. The oncologist wants to do another scan after four session instead of six (which was before the reaction to number two) and I’m dreading the result of that.
life at the moment seems to be like a pin ball machine being pushed from one decision to another and ones which feel totally out of our control.
Im sorry for such a long post, thanks for reading this far.
