In
the past 6 months, after 4 years of treatment for Prostate Cancer which failed,
my 63 year old husband and father to our 18 year old son was told that his
treatment which comprised 7 weeks of radiotherapy followed up by 4 years of
hormone therapy had failed. The
prognosis was dire. He had, when told of the treatment’s failure, a prognosis
of less than a year to live. Doctors
like to be as optimistic as possible. I am a realistic pessimist. I reckon that if my husband sees the next 3
months out, he’ll be fairly lucky.
He’d
have been luckier still had he have actually said that he’d been having wee
problems 2 years before he mentioned them to me let alone to anyone in the
medical profession. Had he have done so, we would not be in the saddest and
most miserable situation in which we currently find ourselves.
What
IS it with men? Anything to do with
bottoms or wee seem to make them hide in their shells, snail like and go
awfully quiet about such things. Maybe the
difference between males and females is the fact that some women have babies
and after gynaecological examinations-a-plenty almost anyone can tell them to
open their legs and they think “Oh, what the hell, practically everyone has
seen my nether regions”, and they display them without too much thought or
fear. Not so with men. The dingly dangly
bits are their own and they’re not for display unless the shower or in moments
of high passion or at least something that some of them consider to be moments
of high passion.
So,
now, instead of just having something which probably started off as an enlarged
prostate, my husband’s liver is affected as are his bones and the cancer has
now spread to his bone marrow. He’s in almost constant pain and now the cancer
has reached the skull which also comprises of bone and marrow, he’s fairly
doo-lally tap, too. Currently he’s in a
hospice where his treatment has improved his physical condition, where the
nursing and medical care have been nothing short of fantastic but, within the
next couple of weeks he’s likely to be moved to a nursing home where, whilst
I’m sure he’ll be treated with kindness, the medical practice just won’t be the
same and he will once again physically deteriorate and the inevitable will
occur.
I
had been caring for him at home but a combination of stress and the ‘flu
prevented me from continuing so to do. I
have a kid who’s in the middle of an important academic year and whose only
relief is to go out and see his friends a great deal. If this is how he deals with it, then fine,
but if his studies suffer, then his father’s death will be in no small way a
contribution to that disaster.
And
me? Well, my ‘flu is getting worse rather than better. My stress levels are at all-time
high. I’ve always suffered from insomnia and now I find myself drinking cups of
tea on the patio at 4.00am nearly each morning.
It’s no great secret on Twitter that my husband and I have had our ups
and downs and plenty of them but I do know that my husband doesn’t want to die,
my son doesn’t want to be fatherless and that I shall be anything but a merry
widow.
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