Feeling...nothing?

hi

I'm the opposite, in the past nothing rattled me

now I freak out at every tiny dot on my skin, skin mets, slight headache, brain mets, tennis elbow, bone mets, eye infections, eye mets, you name it I'm certain I've got it. I've had bad flu each year since chemo and one year you could hear the fluid on my lungs. Everyone else I read about has had the lung fluid biopsied but not me, why didn't someone think to send me for investigations ?

I said  if I've got secondaries surely it's better to start treatment right away, but I was told by my GP that's not the case, the outcomes are the same, I wasn't sure what he meant, it felt like he was saying you'll die anyway, what the point of wasting the drugs on you but what he actually meant, I think, was that the drugs tend to work for a finite amount of time and then you have to switch to another and so on but realistically they still give you 2 to 5 years. That doesn't vary whether you start treatment immediately or not, and I sort of do see that but in the case of brain mets, surely it's going to be easier to deal with 1 small tumour than excavating a large one or more.

It sends me round in circles and I can't get anything done. I know it infuriates one particular person and I guess I ought to raise it as a topic but people just seem to think you can get over it and get on with your life and I just can't. 

I had a rocky road to diagnosis which was frustrating but in some respects it was easier to deal with once I knew what it was.

The treatment was brutal and that was a big factor, my husband fixated on my hair so losing it was always going to be difficult.

I want to be free of my situation and felt that a break was actually what I needed.

How did HR and OH allow you to work through chemo but have to sanction a return after surgery ?

Carolyn

xx

Hi Carolyn, 

HR and OH have to clear i before I go back whereas I wasn't off sick for the treatment, just took treatment days, so they didn't have to sanction anything.

Sorry to hear that you are feeling the way you do and thank you for sharing it. I do find I can say things on here that I feel uncomfortable with anywhere else.

@coutleberry  (sorry, the tags aren't working!) 

I identify completely! 

I was first diagnosed in Sept 2013 after a routine mammogram and did the surgery, chemo and radiotherapy route. Like you, I never felt like I was dealing with cancer, just going through the treatment and then getting back to normal life. I never really felt emotionally involved with the condition - much less than most of my friends and relatives! I didn't feel ill (apart from the side effects of the chemo at times), so that probably helped! 

I was rediagnosed with stage 4 in lungs and bones in June 2017 and have been on the chemo route ever since. My oncologist gave me less than a year to live last July, but I'm still largely detached from the thought of cancer itself - this is life now, and we do what we need to to carry on going beyond my sell by date. Although I get frustrated at times by the things I can't do - I can't walk far and I get very breathless, so it limits quite a lot of activities I'd like to do, but I do what I can and still book things that I enjoy that I can do! I VERY rarely get cross with having the disease itself and have never been upset by it - it is what it is, and we deal with it! I DO feel poorly quite a lot now, especially with fatigue, but hey, a nanny nap every day is not a bad thing... 

I probably worry less about little things than I used to, which is probably a good thing, and I don't need to go to work now as I'm medically retired and have a good pension package, so I don't need to worry about money. I realise that this makes me very lucky in comparison to a lot of other people! 

So, you're not alone, it's just the way your mind has decided to deal with the whole thing. You might find that it changes when treatment has finished, or you might not! There is no right way to deal with cancer - we're all different and we get through it in the way we can do it best! 

I wish you all the best for the rest of your treatment 

Hugs to you

hi Cathy,

sorry to hear about the lungs, I only pop on here occasionally nowadays

good news about the pension package though

hugs

Carolyn

xxx