Hi,
I'm 33 and my mum (72) was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last summer. She's had an operation and chemotherapy and now she's starting radiation therapy. We were told from early on that everything we do is buying time but the end result is inevitable.
by the way my partner and I moved from the UK to a different country to be here with her.
I'm not going to bore you with details, I'm just looking for support or advice. I know there's no solution to my problem but it's the first time in my life that I'm so scared and worried. I've had a very happy life up until my mum's diagnosis.
this has affected my work and my general well-being obviously. Losing my mum to cancer has been my biggest fear since a very young age because she's lost her mother to breast cancer when she was around my age and I know how horrid that was for her. So I've been experiencing my worst fear and the only knowledge I have is that it's only going to get worse.
I pretend to be strong for her and my dad -we're very close as a family- but there are days that I can't get out of bed, that I don't think I'll ever recover from this. And I feel guilty for thinking that because I should be worried about her, not myself.
Sometimes I don't know how to support her, what to say to her, how to comfort her. By the way, my mum is the kind of person who's always been in complete denial of death, convinced that she's going to live until she's 100 , which although a helpful attitude in the past, now it's made this whole thing even more difficult to accept.
for the first time in my life I feel utterly hopeless and out of control of my life. I feel that I'm slowly dying inside every day. This whole experience has been a torture, but how am I supposed to hope that the torture is going to end since I know that the only way that this will end is with my mum's death?
How is anyone supposed to deal with this?
