It is stage 4 pancreatic cancer

Hi Lisa,  I am so sorry to hear about your diagnosis.  It is so frightening being told your cancer is not curable.  I know what you mean when I was told I had incurable cancer I thought my life was over.  All my dreams and plans seemed to disappear when I was told.  We had planned to move abroad this year back to our family in South Africa and plans to travel and do adventures.  In one sentence it felt like it was wiped out.  I am now one year on and life is good again.  I have to make new plans and smaller adventures but it has taken me a long time to come to terms with it (I am not sure that I have or if I am in denial).  I have not been given a life expectancy and I don't want to know.  I am just taking each day at a time.  I am on the Macmillan forum for incurable cancer and so many people have lived far longer than what they have been told.  The new medicine treatments and trials that are coming out give me hope.  I wanted to tell you that you are not alone and I am here to chat.  Take care and sending you hugs.

Lee x

Anytime Lisa, I am on here everydayx

Lee x

Hello Lisa

Welcome to the forum

Lee has made a really nice reply to your post. Like her I do not want to be informed of timescales for longevity and do not ask. I like the term incurable rather than terminal because something other than cancer may get you first. All your thoughts and emotions are to be expected, there is no easy way to cope. You are allowed to be ungrateful, selfish and bitter if need be although you probably are not and you are right, night time in the early hours brings the demons. One of my demons is that I am a fraud and surely there has been some dreadful mistake made in my diagnosis. (Palliative care but chance of remission). Others that all my life choices have been bad ones. That I am a total loser.That I have not been a good person and that cancer is some sort of retribution. All irrational thoughts but the sort of stuff all cancer patients must at times experience.

Have you been assigned a McMillan nurse at the hospital? If so approach them for support, they can point you in the right direction for whatever your needs physical, emotional, mental health, finances, benefits, care. Also check out Maggies  https://www.maggies.org/  there may be help near you. Our hospital has a drop in Centre for patients being treated for cancer and their families and  loved ones. Offering support over a wide range of things, does your hopital have one?  Also you can chat on the phone with the Cancer Research nurses on this forum. 

Even today people are reluctant to talk about cancer and often you hear it being discussed in hushed tones or called the Big C even on this forum. And more so mental health, which for no reason has a stigma attached to it. Cancer affects all of us in our mental health and the trauma of it expresses itself in lots of often irrational ways. So you are not alone in this and talking about shared experiences either on a forum or in a group often helps in understanding why you feel the way you do.

You are not alone and as for being scared most of us deep down are too.

Ed