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 -
I went down to visit my father over the weekend. As soon as I walked through the door, he asked me to sit down with him on a call he was on with an estate lawyer. Due to all the various contingencies, I am in line as a guardian for my youngest brother as well as a trustee for his bequests.
He also wanted to be there when discussing what he wants to leave me. My father has always lived fairly simply, and I didn't realize he was as well off as he was. He apologized that he couldn't leave me more, then told me what his intentions were.
It's a life-changing amount. I don't think I'd be able to retire today with it, but it moves my retirement horizon from 20 years from now to like... four years from now.
The whole time he was going over it, all I could think was "I don't want any of that. I just want my dad." It's an absolute mindfuck. I don't want to think about it at all, but it's very important to him that I have a plan on how to be responsible with anything that he leaves me.
End stage cancer treatment is very expensive, so all of this is up in the air, but I need to think about how to handle this.
On the purely medical front, the side effects of the chemo don't seem to be nearly as bad as he feared it would be. He's also on an enormous cocktail of drugs meant to keep those side effects under control. At least one of those drugs is an anti-psychotic, and at least one is an antidepressant. They're being used off label for appetite stimulation and nausea, but they're still having psychological effects. He's in a weird state where he knows he should be more distressed than he is, and he knows that should distress him as well, but it just doesn't.
Side effects or not, at least he's eating now. He's lost enough weight that I can feel his bones when I hug him. We're all hoping that keeps up. The doctors have said that losing too much weight during chemo can be harmful.
My youngest brother seems to be taking things better than I have been. I don't know if it's because he's compartmentalizing, or if he just hasn't grasped the magnitude of what is happening, or if it's because this has been going on for such a long part of his short life already that he's had a chance to come to terms with it. Thankfully, he has a huge extended family who are always there to support him.
My step-mother is trying hard to keep it together. She and my father run a small business together and she's trying to pick up the slack.
I've been trying to help out with household tasks whenever I'm down, but she's very particular and it feels like trying to help just results in more work for her. I want to help, but I'm not really sure how I can other than just physically being there because my father likes to have me around. Unfortunately, that means that I get to sit in a chair as my dad falls asleep and I get to listen to him struggle to breathe.
I'm not sure if I'm really looking for advice here, because I don't know what to ask.
Maybe the only thing I really can ask is what you can do to help someone who's clearly overloaded, but can't stand it when something isn't done the way they would do it, and doesn't know how to explain what they want?
My suggestion based on some limited experience is to help in ways they care less about but also take effort: if not household tasks like cooking and cleaning, maybe it's running errands and getting groceries, fixing things around the house, or maybe it's handling mail, bills, paperwork, and tax prep.
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