What is the hardest part of dealing with Cancer?

The fact that you know have a timeline for the end of your life. Knowing when it will come would be the worst.

What @jackm said is bad enough. However, I do believe that there is something worse..

Imagine realising that very soon, you will not be able to do all the things you used to do and that soon enough you’ll have to spend the rest of your days in a hospital bed.
Imagine knowing that your own body is turning against you, eating you up and eventually killing you. You will never look the same again, and your body will deteriorate in front of your very eyes.
Place yourselves in the shoes of the cancer sufferer who has to see his close friends and family looking at him through eyes of pain and suffering, through forced smile and bowed heads. And what of when you know that they’re crying somewhere where you can’t see or hear them just so that they won’t appear sad near you?
Imagine knowing that all the dreams you used to dream of doing will probably never be accomplished.

Now imagine putting all that together.

That’s how bad cancer is.

What is terrible is knowing that the treatments will feel as if you were being tortured, but they still might not beat the cancer. However, without the treatments there is no hope.

That your loved one is going to die.

For those with young children, fearing you will never see your kids grow up, go to their graduations, watch them get married, have grandkids.

What it takes out of you. The treatments. That you don’t even feel like yourself for what is left to you. That normal life was over before you knew it was gone. That nothing will ever really be normal again.

One of the most difficult things is breaking this ‘cancer’ word down to the particular parts of the ‘cancer disease’ label which apply specifically to me. Cancer is actually :
....~110 different cell types….. which 1 do I have?
.... where is it in my body? what size is it , of T1, T2, T3, T4 size
.... are lymph nodes involved? N0, N1, etc?
.... has it spread beyond the primary site? i.e. has it metastesized?
.... what critical normal tissues are close to this primary site

I need to own all of this….. it’s mine….. I’m going to fight it…..... go to good multidisciplinary clinics in cancer centers where the cancer surgeon, medical oncologist , and radiation oncologist can , together, teach me about this and how to specifically choose the correct combination of treatments so I can best fight this.

No 2 cancer patients needs can be identical…..... the combinatorial aspects of all the various aspects of MY cancer , MY makeup, MY needs .. make it so.

For my Mom, it was feeling like her body had betrayed her. Thinking she had done everything right and something still went wrong.

Happily, she survived.

{{{@SarasWhimsy}}}