MeAndMine wrote:Thanks everyone! I am determined to be prepared. I've been feeling things the last few days. I know they say it's slow growing but somehow things are getting harder and I've been hurting. I keep thinking that it's going to break through a wall or something because I wasn't feeling these things before.
It didn't help that yesterday I was told that maybe I need to take a good look at myself and why I got cancer. I am told I'm holding on to anger. I didn't think I was angry. I was, however, in the "what's the use" mindset. It was really hard to lose my sister from cancer then have my husband diagnosed with cancer the same week, so I'm sure I was angry but mostly I was just sad, sad, sad. It felt like the harder we tried, the more things happened. Mostly I just try to put one foot in front of the other and not think. Some days are better than others.
My daughter bought me a 28oz water bottle. Looking at the markings, if I fill it all the way to the lid, I think it's 32 ounces. I used to keep 8 water bottles on the counter and would grab one when I walked that way, to make sure I had them all empty by the end of the day. I think I do better if I have it all ready to go in the morning rather than emptying and refilling the same bottle.
I watched a video yesterday where a girl said she set her alarm to go to the bathroom every 2 hours during chemo so that her bladder would not be effected by chemo. Is that something you have done or heard about? Are there any other "tricks" that we should do like that?
I know how you feel as I was wondering why the surgeon couldn't just cut the thing out and why I had to go through chemo and radiation. The chemo and radiation started to reduce the tumor about two - three weeks in and there was the relief. When I complained about the fullness feeling, the medical staff would only suggest Miralax or other softeners. I had a lot of worry that something would break as well and it was very uncomfortable for quite some time.
I asked my doctor why I got cancer and he said because I turned 50. The risk of cancer doubles every seven years of life as I guess that's the turnover for cells or something like that. Each duplication causes the potential for a mutation. There are mechanisms to fix the mutations but they can break too.
This morning I had alarms at 1 AM, 2 AM, 3 AM, 4 AM and 5 AM but that was for LARS. I think that I woke up three times as I usually sleep through a few of them. I had alarms every two hours when I had the ileostomy because I was worried about it filling up and leaking overnight. But those are different things.
I had my radiation appointments at 8:00 AM so I did not have needing to pee overnight as an issue. After the radiation treatment, I headed straight to the bathroom to let it all out as it is a lot of water.
You go through a lot of emotions through the cancer journey. One of my rituals was updating my will and providing all of my username/passwords to accounts to family members before a surgery. I think that everyone that has gone through this has had the very wide range and type of emotions that I've seen.