I was diagnosed in December with lung cancer & severe COPD.
It’s been a rollercoaster of emotions, lifestyle changes & readjustments.
My lung cancer unfortunately has no other treatment available other than surgical removal of lower & middle lobe my right lung. This obviously due to my COPD condition is high risk & surgeons said removal was “high risk”. The cancer according to PET & CT scans are slow growing, but I’m in darkness. I’m living in a twilight world of waiting. My next scan they’ve scheduled is in September, but I’m currently in a world of uncertainty. I’ve a historical medical record, since an early teen, many surgeries, I’ve known what it means to struggle on a daily basis. However nothing has prepared me for this. People ask “oh what treatment are you having?” Or they say “but you’re looking so well!! “You’ve not lost weight” .Some believe I’m lying cause my hair is not falling out or I say there’s no pill I can take, no hospital visits on a weekly basis. Im blessed with some amazing friends who keep me going, but I hide what’s going on, they have simply no idea unless as the saying goes “walk a mile in my shoes, I wade through sinking mud every waking moment it’s so hard & yet all I see on my fb feed are cancer patients that are amazing “go fund me” pages, I’m “walking the Himalayas” or “I did the marathon” it’s about as much as I can I do to get out my bed in the morning. Let alone make my bed, as a cancer patient I feel so feeble in the wake of all these amazing people who achieve these goals. Feeling a failure at living with cancer. I’ve failed enough in my life, I’ve no idea what September will bring but I’m already terrified.
Hi Sausage roll welcome to the group, but sorry you have found yourself here. There are a few people here that are at the same stage as yourself, which is called watch and wait. In other words they have a slow growing cancer, which the oncologist has decided to monitor for several months to see how much it grows.
It is so hard when you get comments from family and friends, who think they know how you should be going through treatment, and they usually have a story of someone they know that was diagnosed and the treatment they had. The thing to remember is that no 2 people’s cancer is the same, no treatment is the same, and no one reacts to treatment in the same way either. If people ask you about your diagnoses, you can simply say I am in the watch and wait stage at the moment, or just tell them you don’t want to talk about it! You don’t have to answer to anyone you don’t want to.
It is hard to see positive stories from people when you are feeling so unwell yourself at the moment. The joys of social media! I certainly couldn’t run a marathon myself, in fact at the moment I am struggling to make it down the stairs!
Hopefully others will come to chat with you soon, as unlike social media, we here do really know how you are feeling.
