Welcome Froggy and happy birthday Andy - sorry you find yourselves on here

Look let's start with the obvious unless you've been granted some evil superpower - you didn't cause this - end of story.

We all have billions of cells in our bodies and they divide on a regular basis to keep renewing our bodies. Thing is they do a pretty poor job of it and very often there are mistakes in the resulting DNA - its what drives the mutations that evolution works on. These mistakes can cause cancers and our bodies have a number of clever ways of detecting and killing cancers. Thing is, they may be clever but they're not perfect and as we get older they aren't as good at it as they once were which is one reason that you're more prone to cancers as you get older.

Yes there are lots of things that can give you cancer like chemicals and stress can increase your risk a bit but the underlying reason that Andy got this cancer is that he got unlucky and his body wasn't up to dealing with this cancer in time.

Not your fault

Yes he could have gone to the doctor earlier but he's a big boy and that's not your fault either - it is also not a given that if he'd gone with the earlier symptoms that they would have spotted the condition either it can be pretty hard to tell between the many aches and pains that people go to their doctors with and spotting the few that are actually early stage cancer.

Sounds to me that you've had a few challenges in your relationship and you feel guilty about some of those leaving him, probably some cross words more recently - most of us have these. What you're now doing is linking that guilt to the cancer and inflating it

No No No - you will put yourself in the bed next to him if you go down that route

I'm not going to tell you you shouldn't feel guilty about anything - I don't know you well enough for that - I will tell you you didn't cause his cancer.

But you need to be strong now, he's going to need you. There may be chemotherapy (not as bad as it sounds) or surgery or other treatment and he'll need your support for that - and if you're strong and you help him through that to whatever end result it is then I don't think you'll ever have any cause to feel guilty

One last tip. Often people get very caught up in the what will I do without this person in my life. I know I did for a while but it leads you into grieving before the person has died and that just increases the pain you feel and its obviously hard for them so just try to think a week at a time , a day at a time - if it is bad news you'll have plenty of time for that later and there's not much you can do now to prepare for that.

Hi Froggy,

I'm so sorry to hear about your husband's problems and hope the diagnosis is better than you fear when you get the next set of results. I have foundf that waiting for them is about the worst part of this experience.

Graham is right, unless you did something drastic like slipping some Polonium into his tea, there is absolutely no way any of this could be down to you!

Cancer is a bit like a terrible lottery and, like a lottery win, nice people have just as much chance of developing cancer as nasty people do. So much of it is down to pure bad luck.

Good luck with the results!
Dave

Hello Dave

Thank you for your message and for taking the time to reply. 

It's true that having to wait for more information is difficult.... We have only just started our journey (just over a week since Andy's collapse) and we have to wait another week for his MRI and colonoscopy, then more wait for the results... This weekend hasn't been very good with Andy being very very tired and hardly moving at all :( He was also sick tonight, I can't wait for these tests so we know what we are really dealing with and so that they can start giving him some kind of relief. He is one of these people who suffer in silence and he won't tell me how he really feels even if I can see from his face that he is in pain and very scared.

We just have to wait though.

I have read your "about me" page, fingers crossed it continues to go well for you! 

All the best

Christelle