13th March 2017
In January 2016, my father was diagnosed with small cell lung cancer. He had just turned 65 years old. He hadn’t smoked for over 10 years, but had been a regular smoker the 30 before that. I learned a lot of things after that; that small cell is worse than non-small cell, weird statistics around life expectancy, treatment options and prognosis.
The strangest thing is how cancer puts everything on hold. My father’s life held in stasis and it becomes a seemingly never ending cycle of chemo, recovery, blood tests, repeat. And the waiting. How is it over a year later? How do my parents live like this? Is it even living? How guilty should I feel that I’m almost 200miles away and don’t see them as often as I would like to? My work, my children, school...
The initial diagnosis was a shock, I cried at all sorts of people, work colleagues, my boss, strangers, family members. But you can’t exist in a perpetual state of grief. It’s exhausting. You force yourself to project optimism. Hope. But secretly and very quietly...it’s not really real. There’s an undercurrent of expecting the worst at any moment, with the result of any scan, or any consultant appointment.
And here we are - 13th March 2017. Another consultant appointment, another biopsy result. My father has a new occurrence on his kidney. My parents and my sister are doctors. They know what this means. I don’t. Apparently the kidney is not the usual place for this to reoccur so soon.
I ask my sister what this means over Facetime when the kids have gone to bed. She says it means it will be faster. The end. My father knows it too.