I am SK, daughter of father and helping to write my fathers thoughts online. Myself I have been struggling how to deal with father (yet he has the cancer not me). I tried to be as practical as possible with getting as much help inside the house and helping out as much myself.
Quality of life
Although father has a metastatic liver cancer, I started buying his favorite treat: "eclair", a pastry thing with lots of pudding and chocolate. Not really ideal for somebody with a bad liver, yet I was so happy to see a smile 🙂 on fathers face when he saw the pastry.
Of course, after a few days the "magic trick" didn’t work that well anymore, but variety in pastries kept the smile and the appetite going 🙂
For sure I was not beating cancer with nutrition, but my father had lost a lot of weight lately (also due to the diarrheas of the cancer research and the vomiting), so my idea was: the more father eats, the better, and it will help against constipation.
I also made a lot of soups of which my father said "they are delicious"… Yet to find out a few days later father telling me: "next time you make soup, try to make soup like mother does" 😛
All in all it is not easy to really find out what quality of life is by asking father, its just when the smile comes on his witty face, that we know we are doing something right…
But I found a lot of relief in reading the below "I have been there – done that" story of another terminal cancer patient:
(from: http://groups.google.tm/group/alt.support.cancer/msg/
81d9761e97472ded?hl=en&, with very special thanks to J from http://groups.google.com/group/alt.support.cancer), which I will post in my next post.
This is not a "how to fight cancer and win" story, yet a story how to win-win yourself and the cancer patient in these difficult times. I am happy when I see a smile on fathers face, and every smile is an extra dose of good health… ( I agree I do write things as if they are not as bad as they are…) If things do look messy, that is because we all feel messy.