The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
My father starts chemotherapy in the new year. I will be heading to see him as often as my job and his physical condition allow.
I wish there were more I could do for him, but I am forcing myself to remember that, at this point, it's out of my hands. It's difficult to unravel our past, but it seems like he's happy that I'm there. If being there helps, I will make an effort to be there.
He has been relying on me to understand and translate the medical jargon that they are lobbing in his direction, and I'm doing my best to keep up. Medical studies are dense pieces of writing, and I'm trying to be both accurate and honest about his choices. I wish I didn't have to be - they're not very good.
I worry about his wife and my youngest brother. They both have a large extended family who want to support them, but none of those family members have ever really dealt with anything like this, and they aren't coordinating with each other at all. They're both getting a little overwhelmed, and I fear it's only going to get worse.
I am exhausted, burnt out, and putting almost all of my effort into simply keeping my shit together. I haven't been eating right, or sleeping right, or exercising regularly, and I'm concerned about the impact this might have on my employment. I don't know what to do about it, though, other than hope for the best. I can't make my father not have stage four metastatic cancer. That's not something I have the power to do.
For anyone who has gone through this before, I have two questions.
First - what can be done to make the treatment more tolerable? The carboplatin/paclitaxel/pembrolizumab cocktail looks like it's going to play merry hell on his system, and if there's anything other than anti nausea medication (already prescribed) that might help, I want to look into it. I'll take anything from double blind randomized clinical trials to old wive's tales at this point.
Second - how do I keep my shit together? My father and I have always had a distance between us. He comes to visit maybe once a decade, and he rarely calls, but he's still my father. I have tried to bridge that gap over the years, and it feels like I'm running out of time. I feel helpless, and like I'm not doing nearly enough, and that this is somehow all my fault. I know that some fraction of that is not rational, but it's difficult to to disentangle everything when you're also confronting the fact that a loved one has less than even odds of making it a year. It feels like I'm coming apart every time I think about it. I don't want to end up in a spiral. That won't help him or me.
I've been going through something similar with my father, though it sounds like we have a very different relationship. My father had a heart attack over the summer, and hasn't been able to walk properly or live independently since for a variety of reasons. He just turned 80, and I've had to learn to live with the fact that he's on his way out, and support my mother and him in the process.
And I think the biggest thing that gets me through it is thinking of myself as a dutiful son, as doing a good thing by caring for my father. While I love my sister, at times this does extend to thinking (quietly to myself) that I'm doing a better job at being a good kid than my sister is. Which I would never say to her, but there's nothing wrong with taking pride in your good deeds.
Your father is going to die. My father is going to die. We have duties as sons, and discharging them well is a good thing to do, and we can take pride in that. We can face the funerals knowing we did everything we should do.
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