Metastatic liver cancer

For people having metastatic liver cancer, there is the bare reality of this blog that metastatic liver cancer can kill you.

There is also hope given by Patti that you can fight this cancer with chemotherapy. Unlike father who was supposed to take 5FU chemotherapy, Patti is taking a Carboplatin/Gemcitibine combo and also Taxol.

What I found quite disturbing is that the doctors show her that there is something in her lung but most likely that’s not the primary tumor…

Same happened with father: the CT scan was showing something in his lungs and something in his right shoulder, yet the oncologist said that most likely that’s not the primary tumor…

Most likely: it’s quite an amount of guessing going on when it comes to cancer.

With October being breast cancer awareness month, I was just thinking that this month will reach almost everybody except children.

So I am on a quest to find some cancer awareness games for children and stumbled upon www.makewish.org/ben.

Ben, a kid with cancer made a wish to create a video game that could explain other children what cancer is and most important: what is needed to cure cancer.

Ben always wins

This shows the incredible amount of optimism children have I find. Although Ben explains that he want’s to teach children the good and not so good aspects of curing cancer only. Somehow he is right: what’s the use in teaching somebody he can die, that’s quite universal knowledge.

The cancer game

If you look at the graphics, you can see that it’s quite a sophisticated game, not your 2 cents Pac Man…

Ben says there are 3 key-points in your battle against cancer:

1. health from the hospital,
2. ammo from the pharmacy and
3. attitude, which you get from home

Through the game the players will hit some setbacks : electrified barriers, which makes you lose some attitude. According to Ben, this is pretty much how you can summarize your fight against cancer.

Players move around the game on a skateboard and will come across:

• a fever monster throwing fireballs
• a giant
• evil chickens representing chicken pox
• a robot called Robarf hurling a green gooey mess representing the sickness most children with cancer will face.

Main thing is that each player needs to use up some of their health to destroy the cancer cells, which is pretty much what chemo-therapy is all about.

So if you have a kid with cancer and you are struggling with how to explain cancer and chemotherapy, try the above approach but better still: download the game and see what happens!

There are more children cancer games out there that I will present in a next post.

We were discussing in our previous post: Is mom depressed?

Now what do you expect when your loving partner of 50 years dies of metastatic liver cancer?

When father died, I had a long stroll on the graveyard. It was amazing to see how old partners are buried next to each other with a date of death less than a few months.

In other words: if one goes to heaven, the partner joins within a few months…

Mom said repeatedly in the very first weeks after father’s dead:

I’d rather hang myself and be death as well…

That’s when my funny brother said:

don’t use the branch on the old oak tree,
it could break and
then you need to go to hospital…

Humor is one way of coping in a survival situation!

In Asian culture, we don’t marry the first year after somebody dies. Why? To give our emotions time to settle down and cope with the new situation.

All I want to add in the discussion Is mom depressed? is that:

• of course mom grieves and is sad
• mom already survived the first 6 months after father’s death and had a shoulder operation which left her without hands for 6 weeks.

Not bad for a person supposed to have a depression…