Cancer is a bugger

About 25 yes ago, I got a phone call from my sister, she was crying;

"I don't want to die", 

She had recently been diagnosed with cancer and sounded like a scared child. I was my usual, useless self, and struggled with finding the right thing to say. 

"I'm frightened. What can I do"

I'm very good at finding the wrong thing to say. But I wanted very much to get it right. I wanted to say that everything would be alright. That she would get better. That the cancer wouldn't win.

My problem was I had been told that there was a chance that it might, and I didn't feel able to make promises I couldn't keep.

Somehow I felt that if I did make that promise and the cancer had won, that I would have personally let her down.

Eventually she calmed and thanked me for listening. I didn't do anything but keep my big mouth shut. Seemingly that was enough.

Perhaps I should do that more often.

So she had the chemotherapy and the radiotherapy and it was horrendous, the nausea and the vomiting were debilitating, the anti sickness drugs next to useless. 

So useless in fact that we asked a friend of my sister to supply us some cannabis, as we had heard that it might be effective in combating the sickness. 

It wasn't particularly.

So my sister struggled for months with the treatment and we all prayed and hoped it would work.

The treatment was cutting edge for the time, a game changer, it was a major improvement on what had been available up to that point. 

So miraculously it seemed to work.

Investigations showed that the cancer had infected the lymph nodes and my sister was advised that the cancer had been hormonal in origin. Neither of which was good news 

She was also told it would probably return.

So for 25 years my sister has lived with the nagging worry that her cancer would come back. That this time the symptom she was feeling would turn out to be it's return.

But as years, then decades past, with no return, we all began to hope that it wouldn't.

That the Doctors had been unnecessarily pessimistic.

Then last week my wife sat me down and said my sisters cancer had reappeared. My sister had been on the phone. 

My wife said she had appeared calm whilst discussing it.

However in typical sister fashion, she had known for several weeks, but hadn't wanted to worry us. We were going on holiday and she hadn't want to ruin it, by us worrying.

We don't yet know what is going to happen, what the treatment will be or the prognosis. We should hear more this week.

My wife has an oncologist friend. She says that treatment for cancers of my sister's type has radically improved and that the anti sickness drugs are much more effective now. She says we shouldn't worry.

Well time will tell. But I retain my right to worry. 

She is my sister after all.