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Sep. 28th, 2011 09:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7Got an email from my mom. Her only brother, my uncle, my godfather, was recently diagnosed with cancer. Today, he tells her, they told him it is incurable.
I am sure the doctors did not use that word. I am sure they said “inoperable”, as it is not only in his lungs, but also in his bones, and a few other places. I know enough about cancer to know what that means. It cannot be removed by an operation. That does not mean it is “incurable”, simply that the prognosis is bad, and there is unlikely to be a good long-term outcome.
They gave him a year to live, and have prescribed him chemo. My mother, in some anguish but with her typical dryly pragmatic mode of self-expression, said she doesn’t understand why they’d put him through the “torture of chemotherapy” if it’s incurable.
He is about sixty, and suffers from depression, and alcoholism, and being a closeted homosexual for most of his life with an older partner who won’t acknowledge him in public because men of his generation don’t talk about such things, and being the little brother of my mother who I admit with love is an overachieving insensitive clod. (I have, let’s just say, a lot in common with my uncle.)
And I don’t really know what to feel. I really don’t. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what kind of help I can offer him, or my mother. I just don’t know what to do. That’s all.
I am sure the doctors did not use that word. I am sure they said “inoperable”, as it is not only in his lungs, but also in his bones, and a few other places. I know enough about cancer to know what that means. It cannot be removed by an operation. That does not mean it is “incurable”, simply that the prognosis is bad, and there is unlikely to be a good long-term outcome.
They gave him a year to live, and have prescribed him chemo. My mother, in some anguish but with her typical dryly pragmatic mode of self-expression, said she doesn’t understand why they’d put him through the “torture of chemotherapy” if it’s incurable.
He is about sixty, and suffers from depression, and alcoholism, and being a closeted homosexual for most of his life with an older partner who won’t acknowledge him in public because men of his generation don’t talk about such things, and being the little brother of my mother who I admit with love is an overachieving insensitive clod. (I have, let’s just say, a lot in common with my uncle.)
And I don’t really know what to feel. I really don’t. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what kind of help I can offer him, or my mother. I just don’t know what to do. That’s all.
