Hi there

Im sorry to hear about your wifes diagnosis. Although slightly different, my wife was diagnosed with metastatic colorectal cancer five months ago. We were infomed by our oncologist that they would get my wife started on chemotherapy asap and mentioned palliative care but was not curable. That was the start of it but I wanted to know more as couldnt just leave it not knowing anything more, although my wife didnt want to know anything else and said she wanted to take it one step at a time.

I stayed behind, looked at the initial ct scans and asked questions such as prognosis, stages of illness, support amongst other things. Palliative care is basically for pain control, maintain quality of life and extend survival (think thats what it was anyway). My wife cant have surgery due to the amount of tumours around her liver so palliative care is only option and think he said when chemo stops working they may try injecting radium beads into her liver to try and shrink tumours but again, wont cure it. The prognosis wasnt what I was expecting at all and devastating but each case is different and oncoligist said it all depends how aggressive the cancer becomes and every case is completely unique.

For us it is now a waiting game and just find the whole situation daunting and frightening but somewhow have to carry and fight on. The best advice I can offer is to write down a few questions you want answers for, leave some space for some notes and go and speak to your oncologist, ask the questions and write it all down. Thats what they are there for afterall. I found it so helpful and still read over them to try and get my head round it all.

I even thought of more things to ask later on, and again, he answered them as best as he could.

Another thing which is what I keep being reminded to do, take care of your wife but equally important...take care of yourself. Stay strong!

thanks for the replies, it's just a bit hard for me to watch her go through this and not being able to do much for her. her first chemo session was ok as she didn't have many side effects but the second session she had has been worse as she's being sick every day (she's on her 3rd different anti sickness tablets) and not able to eat much and even when she does eat she'll just vomit it back up again a few minutes later, she has spoken to the chemo nurses who have spoke to her consultant and they told her to try to take 2 of the stomach lining tablets to try and stop this, her next chemo session is tuesday 17th nov and they are reduceing the strength of the chemo this in the hope she won't suffer as bad this time. 

thanks for the replies, it's just a bit hard for me to watch her go through this and not being able to do much for her. her first chemo session was ok as she didn't have many side effects but the second session she had has been worse as she's being sick every day (she's on her 3rd different anti sickness tablets) and not able to eat much and even when she does eat she'll just vomit it back up again a few minutes later, she has spoken to the chemo nurses who have spoke to her consultant and they told her to try to take 2 of the stomach lining tablets to try and stop this, her next chemo session is tuesday 17th nov and they are reduceing the strength of the chemo this in the hope she won't suffer as bad this time.