Cancer, The Ugliest of Words

To my loyal followers, readers and friends within the blogging community I want to thank you all for being patient and supportive with the little work I have posted the last couple of months here on the blog and given a change in circumstances this week and I am now free to discuss what has been going on.

First a little back story on my home situation, I still live at home with my parents and my brother, this has mostly been because of a lack of finances to move out on my own and my difficulty in finding permanent full-time work. Because I have lived at home for so long in my adult life I have grown a strong bond and relationship with both my parents. My mother is one of the most reliable and caring people I know and the same can be said about my father who is the kind of person who would drop everything if he had the time to and help a friend in need. Over the last few years, however, since retiring from being a radiator repairer my father’s health has slowly declined.

For most of last year he was in a lot of pain that slowly grew worse, and at first, we all thought he had taken a fall and not told anyone about it. He is a stubborn man my father you see and rarely asks for help. Early October last year my dad had some scans done on his shoulder. At worse, we were expecting a break that did not heal properly and that was the cause of the pain. Oh, how I wish that had been the case. They found a tumor in my dad’s shoulder, wrapped around the bone and he had to have a shoulder replacement. The tumor was cancerous. My dad was diagnosed with cancer.

The year before last we had a cancer scare in the family with my grandfather and he got treatment and got better. So in the back of my mind, I was like we can fight this with dad, we will all help him to get better. I was worried about my dad all through November but I was also positive he would fight this and get better. But as more and more doctors appointments happened, more tests they did the news just kept getting worse and worse.

In December my dad had the op on his shoulder and while he was in the hospital I heard my mum talking about my father needing Palliative Care when he comes out of the hospital. Palliative Care for those who don’t know is the care someone gets when they do not have long to live. It is special care for the dying.

My father has a very aggressive form of skin cancer, that is now in his blood and to make matters more difficult it is an extremely rare form of cancer which means the doctors do not know how long he has left.

This news has taken quite a toll on me and my family especially when it comes to all our mental health. Especially myself who over the years have had great struggles with mental health. I am writing this post not to look for sympathy in my situation but because this is something I need to talk about. This is why I have been so sporadic with my blogging the last few months and I honestly do not know when or if the blogging schedule will ever be back to normal at this point.

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I want to once again thank all the wonderful people I have met through the years of blogging on here! Thank you, everyone, for taking the time to read this post.

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