So scared of cancer

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Whoa. A friend's mother has just been diagnosed with stage 4 liver cancer and is given until Christmas to live. She is elderly but even so, that's so scary that stage 4 cancer can still be so discreet and asymptomatic until like a few weeks before it's going to kill you. She seemed to be doing all right before, even for her age. A bit slow but that's to be expected for a person of her age. Otherwise she was fine, nobody would have thought she had stage 4 liver cancer.

I really hate cancer. It's high time they stopped spending millions on nuclear bombs and started spending millions on finding a prevention for cancer. I'm sure we can do it, despite cancer being so complex. Why can't there be a special vaccination that stops cancerous blood cells from having the domino effect in the body? Something like that? I'm so scared of cancer. One in two people get cancer. That's the same as saying one in two people are born a male or a female. It's like when you're born you're assigned in one of two camps - one camp is those who won't ever get cancer in their lifetime, the second camp is those who are doomed to get cancer at some point in their lifetime. I wonder which camp I'm consigned to.

Yeah I know
A similar thing happened to my neighbour a few years ago

One minute she was legging it about, sticking her nose in everyones business and then next was dead

That was cancer and she was riddled with it

Its scary when you think

It's not so much the cancer that scares me, it's the chemotherapy and its side effects.

What scares me the most about getting cancer is being sick. I think all cancer patients be sick at some point, chemo or not.

I'm also scared of loved ones getting it.

My mother got it and died, but at least she wasn't given just weeks to live. She lived 6 years after being diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, but it was my fault she got cancer because stress apparently causes cancer and I was the biggest stress in the world so it's no wonder she got ill. It's a thought I've got to live with for the rest of my life, which is why I become very distressed and angry with myself if anyone suggests that I'm a bad terrible person, makes me feel like I'm going to hell when I die (if I believed in all that, which luckily I don't).

That's a heavy load to carry Tamaya

I bet your mum would never have blamed you

Mums don't see it like that though

You might have been difficult but she loved you so that would balance out any stress

But it's sad that you feel you have to carry that burden

Yeah, I mean no matter how much I ran her down to the ground, she still went above and beyond to do what's best for me and never put herself first. I guess I took advantage of that, but I think everyone does really.

I think you've done really well anyway with everything you've been through

I think a lot of us are holy terrors at some point.

You just sound like a kid with ADHD to me, Tamaya.

I know that that can definitely be extraordinarily stressful for families, but...

My oldest brother was diagnosed with lung cancer on his birthday -- I think he was turning 68. He had lots of warning signs that gave him a possible chance but he just ignored them. He passed away a week and a half later.

Some years ago, one couple I knew -- a doctor and wife -- went to his father's house for Thanksgiving. The father was also a doctor. The son looked at him and checked him into the hospital that day. He died the next day from lung cancer. The father was well aware of the cancer signs and had to have known he had cancer. He has skipped his previous two yearly checkups probably because he knew he had lung cancer. The son's wife told me that they felt that he had preferred not to subject his family to the expense and effort to fight it knowing that it was nearly impossible to fight.

I do hate living with this fear where each time I feel nauseous or lose my appetite I immediately think it's cancer (if not norovirus). It's because my mother suddenly started being sick out of the blue and she didn't know what was wrong, and it wasn't until she was rushed into hospital from dehydration was when stage 4 bowel cancer was discovered.

There's an operation you can get where they tie a tube or something in your stomach so that food and drink can get down but can never come up. I want to know if I can have this operation but I can't find much on Google about it, the only thing I know is that it can cause complications.

Wouldn't it be great if humans could not vomit? And, please, don't say that vomiting is a great way to relieve your body of toxins, because I'd actually rather die than be sick (but I don't want to die being sick).

**Trigger warning/TMI**

to everyone's comments here by the way.

You really had a tough time, Tamaya. Your poor tummy. No wonder you developed a phobia.