That sounds pretty familiar. When my Mum was in her final weeks all we could do was try to keep her comfortable and the end seemed a relief when it came.
I feel for you keep your picker up I have just found out my youngest daughter has breast cancer you feel so helpless you want to make every thing right I am thinking of you good luck jean
Hello Dave , they are now starting radiotherapy with the chemo but he can hardly move I feel so helpless,I think that it is only a matter of weeks, he has lost so much weight and cant even eat and yet they keep pumping him full of drugs, where and when do they ever say lets keep him comfortable and let him be at peace.
That's a hard one to answer. Your husband's care team should and must take their lead from him. Have you had a conversation with your husband about what he wants to do? He may feel he doesn't want to let anyone down by giving up.
When Mum decided she had endured enough, she called time on her treatment. The team respected her decision and moved into end of life care rather than trying to prolong things when her treatment was causing more harm than good. Some family members took a while to accept her decision, but they came around in the end.
I think that my husband is scared , he was always such a strong personality and this illness has had a devasting effect upon him , but in the same token I think that he does not want to let go , he will not discuss anything, he will not allow the macmillan team to intervene at all, and will accept no help from our GP, so I am stuck between a rock and a hard plate, he has forbidden me to talk to anyone about side effects that he is having to the chemo, and tells the doctors that all is well.
To an extent I can understand how he feels, it is a very scary place to be in. When I was on chemo I suffered the side effects for a while until I realised that some of them could be managed and I felt like an idiot for not saying I was having problems. In my case, the infusions were actually causing pain as they were going into my veins. They simply furrher diluted the chemo by doubling the amount of saline going into the canula and that particular problem disappeared.
I've not had radiotherapy but the chemo made me feel far more ill than the cancer has so far done. On the plus side, I would be dead by now if I hadn't had the chemo and the side effects disappeared within a few weeks of me reaching the end of my treatment.
I hope your husband responds well to the treatments and starts to feel better before too long and that most of his problems turn out to be side effects and not the cancer taking hold.
Hi Dave, I still feel that they are pumping him full of chemo to no avail ,and in all my experience as a Nurse Practitioner for over 20 years, I have never heard a patient say that they had cancer of stomach and secondaries in the lung and survived to live a full life cancer free. I just wish that the medical profession would be more honest with patients and relatives, I just feel they are giving us all false hope. I probably sound very bitter but I just want some honest answers and nobody is giving them to me.
