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TW for cancer, death, emetophobia.
My father was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer a few weeks ago. It's created lesions on the liver, but hasn't spread to other forms of cancer and everything else (brain, lungs, bones) are clear. That makes treatment more accessible; he's undergoing chemotherapy now, and later will be on cancer growth blockers, which turns very little time into a projected ~15 months. Or, as my dad phrased it, he isn't going to die this year.
There's a lot of narratives I can build around this, tell about this—sometimes they help me process, but this has also felt too much like a story; like, I suppose, something that sounds like it should happen to someone else.
Some stories:
My mum blurting out "I'm tired of you telling me one of my family members has cancer" to my dad's GP. My sister was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer in 2014, and while she's fully recovered now it took a lot of work and a lot of energy, for her most of all, but for my entire family. It contributed to a year-long depressive episode on my part. We had all just recovered; we're dealing now with my paternal grandfather's Alzheimer's, with my cousin's severe illness. We were owed a break.
Feeling the profound need to vomit when I heard the news, which was just a panic attack, but which stuck with me for two solid weeks. My father's first symptom was an upset stomach, but because he had a cancer-free CT scan just three months ago cancer was the last thing they tested for this time. Three months from nothing to terminal. All nausea I've ever had my entire life is immediately treatable by eating something (even if it's something that will eventually upset my stomach, eating/immediately after always feels better); eating made this feel worse, so it's absolutely psychosomatic, and it's hard to complain about psychosomatic, sympathetic, anxious stomach pain when cancer.
(Reliving every time I silently judged his upset-stomach-era diet, thinking "no wonder that unhealthy/greasy/dairy/whatever food is upsetting your stomach" when it was cancer, it was cancer; of course nothing was helping, and that petty instinct to judge and micromanage just feels so cruel in retrospect.)
When my parents started to tell their group of friends, there was a weekend of staggered social calls. One family friend would not stop harping on my dad's intrinsic, all-cancer-aside health, an admixture of "but if his baseline health is good, he should be easier to treat, right?" and "but he of all people, the most active and healthy of us, should be immune to this"—this insistence, insistence, insistence, that there should be some sort of logic and deserving to illness, that if people do the right things then they won't get sick and will get better, which is proving to be increasingly untrue.
The other visits were almost entirely gossip, small talk; life goes on—my parents installed a new closet storage system in the same weekend of brain scans and chest scans. So much of the gossip is about who knows what about the illness, where it would be awkward to mention "how awful about Dave" and have the listener reply "wait, what?" I don't know how to make life go on, everyone else's domestic busywork seems to me so futile—and, rationally, I know that's taken for granted, that it is, that we do it anyway; but I'm looking at a yawning gulf of a depressive episode that I don't know how to quantify. Will this make the breast cancer era look uncommitted? will this be like college? do I lose time, destroy my relationships, disappear? how can I be there for my family, how can I spend this last bit of time with my dad, and also fall apart?
We as a society are so paranoid about opioids, they come with such warning labels and cultural baggage, that my father had to be cajoled and badgered into taking enough meds to not be in pain from cancer. I see the microaggression of this every day in the spoonie community, but I literally cannot articulate how angry it made me that my father's instinct was to prioritize dosing schedules over pain.
(And "your cancer and you!" photocopied pamphlets from the GP that talk about decreasing cellphone use, which, fuck you.)
My father is the best of us; if there's one family member I could pick to live forever, it would be him. He's well-adjusted, affable, happy, chronically happy. When I first got sick from crazy, we had clashes because he couldn't comprehend that extent of unhappiness—he couldn't understand why I just, you know, couldn't stop. He still took care of me, when I became unable to care for myself. When my sister was diagnosed with cancer he taught himself to love us all in the moment, even sick, even in positions he couldn't comprehend. It's a capacity and capability, a choice to be willfully kind, that few people possess. He has shown that care to my mother for decades, in a way that reminds me of my relationship with Devon—the sort of relationship so sincere and unconditional that I would deem it unrealistic if I weren't a recipient. He is a very good man, the best of us, and I am so angry that when cancer, again—after his mother, after Cokie, after Allie, after Mamakitty, this entire gamut of "after a long and healthy life" and "totally recoverable" and "grandparent" and "rescue cat"—after all that, when it was cancer, again, it has to be terminal and had to be him.
I'm reading a lot and wasting time in an MMO, and dealing with separate and preexisting cat crises that I frankly don't have the energy for; as a small blessing I'm living in Corvallis now, so it's easy to visit home. I have a lot of narratives and feelings, and also a significant silence; everything else seems ridiculous. Who cares? there's cancer. I keep adding it to conversations: today I vacuumed, Gilly escaped and hid under the master bed, and my dad is going to die of cancer. I can't tell yet if it feels unreal or too real; if it's private family pain or if I need everyone to know that nothing matters, they don't matter, I don't matter: cancer. Cancer trumps everything, again. Again, but worse this time. I'm very tired.
My father was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer a few weeks ago. It's created lesions on the liver, but hasn't spread to other forms of cancer and everything else (brain, lungs, bones) are clear. That makes treatment more accessible; he's undergoing chemotherapy now, and later will be on cancer growth blockers, which turns very little time into a projected ~15 months. Or, as my dad phrased it, he isn't going to die this year.
There's a lot of narratives I can build around this, tell about this—sometimes they help me process, but this has also felt too much like a story; like, I suppose, something that sounds like it should happen to someone else.
Some stories:
My mum blurting out "I'm tired of you telling me one of my family members has cancer" to my dad's GP. My sister was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer in 2014, and while she's fully recovered now it took a lot of work and a lot of energy, for her most of all, but for my entire family. It contributed to a year-long depressive episode on my part. We had all just recovered; we're dealing now with my paternal grandfather's Alzheimer's, with my cousin's severe illness. We were owed a break.
Feeling the profound need to vomit when I heard the news, which was just a panic attack, but which stuck with me for two solid weeks. My father's first symptom was an upset stomach, but because he had a cancer-free CT scan just three months ago cancer was the last thing they tested for this time. Three months from nothing to terminal. All nausea I've ever had my entire life is immediately treatable by eating something (even if it's something that will eventually upset my stomach, eating/immediately after always feels better); eating made this feel worse, so it's absolutely psychosomatic, and it's hard to complain about psychosomatic, sympathetic, anxious stomach pain when cancer.
(Reliving every time I silently judged his upset-stomach-era diet, thinking "no wonder that unhealthy/greasy/dairy/whatever food is upsetting your stomach" when it was cancer, it was cancer; of course nothing was helping, and that petty instinct to judge and micromanage just feels so cruel in retrospect.)
When my parents started to tell their group of friends, there was a weekend of staggered social calls. One family friend would not stop harping on my dad's intrinsic, all-cancer-aside health, an admixture of "but if his baseline health is good, he should be easier to treat, right?" and "but he of all people, the most active and healthy of us, should be immune to this"—this insistence, insistence, insistence, that there should be some sort of logic and deserving to illness, that if people do the right things then they won't get sick and will get better, which is proving to be increasingly untrue.
The other visits were almost entirely gossip, small talk; life goes on—my parents installed a new closet storage system in the same weekend of brain scans and chest scans. So much of the gossip is about who knows what about the illness, where it would be awkward to mention "how awful about Dave" and have the listener reply "wait, what?" I don't know how to make life go on, everyone else's domestic busywork seems to me so futile—and, rationally, I know that's taken for granted, that it is, that we do it anyway; but I'm looking at a yawning gulf of a depressive episode that I don't know how to quantify. Will this make the breast cancer era look uncommitted? will this be like college? do I lose time, destroy my relationships, disappear? how can I be there for my family, how can I spend this last bit of time with my dad, and also fall apart?
We as a society are so paranoid about opioids, they come with such warning labels and cultural baggage, that my father had to be cajoled and badgered into taking enough meds to not be in pain from cancer. I see the microaggression of this every day in the spoonie community, but I literally cannot articulate how angry it made me that my father's instinct was to prioritize dosing schedules over pain.
(And "your cancer and you!" photocopied pamphlets from the GP that talk about decreasing cellphone use, which, fuck you.)
My father is the best of us; if there's one family member I could pick to live forever, it would be him. He's well-adjusted, affable, happy, chronically happy. When I first got sick from crazy, we had clashes because he couldn't comprehend that extent of unhappiness—he couldn't understand why I just, you know, couldn't stop. He still took care of me, when I became unable to care for myself. When my sister was diagnosed with cancer he taught himself to love us all in the moment, even sick, even in positions he couldn't comprehend. It's a capacity and capability, a choice to be willfully kind, that few people possess. He has shown that care to my mother for decades, in a way that reminds me of my relationship with Devon—the sort of relationship so sincere and unconditional that I would deem it unrealistic if I weren't a recipient. He is a very good man, the best of us, and I am so angry that when cancer, again—after his mother, after Cokie, after Allie, after Mamakitty, this entire gamut of "after a long and healthy life" and "totally recoverable" and "grandparent" and "rescue cat"—after all that, when it was cancer, again, it has to be terminal and had to be him.
I'm reading a lot and wasting time in an MMO, and dealing with separate and preexisting cat crises that I frankly don't have the energy for; as a small blessing I'm living in Corvallis now, so it's easy to visit home. I have a lot of narratives and feelings, and also a significant silence; everything else seems ridiculous. Who cares? there's cancer. I keep adding it to conversations: today I vacuumed, Gilly escaped and hid under the master bed, and my dad is going to die of cancer. I can't tell yet if it feels unreal or too real; if it's private family pain or if I need everyone to know that nothing matters, they don't matter, I don't matter: cancer. Cancer trumps everything, again. Again, but worse this time. I'm very tired.
