Cancer but no prognosis

[ocrendby]

FIL has been diagnosed with prostate cancer that has apparently got into his bones.

DH is obviously in bits about it.

FIL has refused a prognosis as he just wants to live his life.

I've done plenty of reading about prognoses for stage 4 prostate cancer and have a bit of an understanding about cancer in general. It seems to me that he may well have another 5-10 years with modern treatments.

When DH said that his dad is dying I said not necessarily and that FIL not getting a prognosis wasn't helping anyone.

I get that this is disrespectful to FIL's wishes but I'm looking at DH always worrying and almost putting his life on hold and so AIBU to feel this way?

My own DH died of pancreatic cancer so very quick after it was identified.

@ocrendby you strike me to be the type of person who simply can’t not know - who has to have all the information possible to make sure they are completely informed. My mum is like this is there is a queue she must know the reason why, how long she is going to be waiting and what her options are.

it is her way of dealing with it - this is your way of trying to deal with the news working it all out.

but whereas it may be your coping mechanism and your way of dealing with it, this isn’t your thing to deal with. Your Fil is clearly someone who prefers not to know the absolutes and to deal with each moment.

both are equally valid coping mechanisms - but it is your FIL who gets to decide how this goes here and in your relationship your DH

I'm very sorry to hear this. The not knowing how long they have left is very hard.

I lost my best friend to prostate cancer, it wasn't diagnosed until stage 4. He was given 2-5 years I think but lived 18 months. It was treated with hormones and painkillers. He had a reasonably good quality of life until the last 2 months. Our local hospital runs a support group for men with prostate cancer and their families, it might be worth seeing if there's something like this for your father in law?

It helps men with prostate cancer to talk to other men about it. Its a disease that can feel very emasculating and embarrassing. It can be really hard to talk about, but when I attended the hospital group I found it refreshing how open and frank men were with each other, nothing was too difficult to talk about. It helped so much.

Haven't read the whole thread but these are good sources of support:

https://prostatecanceruk.org/prostate-information-and-support/get-support

https://tackleprostate.org

Wishing you and your family all the best at this difficult time

This doesn’t say you have 5-10 years left. It says half the people due before 5 years?

in any case this is not the time to inform your dh and fil that they are overreacting and it’s not that bad.

This made me laugh,my father's solution to cure my stage 4 breast cancer mets,is cos liver oil ..
I must ask my oncologist about that.
Op, I have not been given a prognosis,and I didn't ask.
But I was told that everything that is on the internet is already 2 years out of date. Treatment for cancer is always evolving as more and more treatments are out there.

**cod liver oil

I can see both sides to be honest. DM is sick, it’s not cancer- but refuses any intervention, however expects me to drop everything in an instant. I’ve no idea what will happen, how long it will go on for or how bad it might get. Perhaps it isn’t my business, but I think it becomes my business when care needs have escalated quickly.
I work full time and have a child. They aren’t things I can just drop.

My father was diagnosed at 63 with Ca prostate, told he would ‘die of something else’
For 30+ years it was controlled with hormone therapy and he refused to even talk about it.
It became evident it had spread about eighteen months before he died, he wouldn’t discuss it with anyone, not even mum.
About four weeks before he died he spontaneously fractured his hip, and basically gradually went downhill.
He was pretty much pain-free once they’d operated, and died peacefully.
I think it all depends on how much the cancer spreads and where. Certainly none of my family were able to have any conversation with dad whatsoever, so that made it incredibly difficult, but his choice.

hypothetical. If i had cancer I might relay remaining-expected-lifespan to DC to help them but not believe a word of it anyway.

However, if I didn't want to know the expected remaining lifespan ... this thread has convinced me i'd probably prefer to delay telling DC about the illness at all. Who wants that extra pressure of their "need to know" when you have to come to terms yourself.

We only have today and now, anyway.

So I first posted at the start of April and now we are three months on.

DFIL is doing great- he gets tired more easily but that's all so far. We are trying to spend time with him but DH has stopped dropping work commitments to be with him every week. Instead we try and see him once a month which is still tricky but better than it was before he was diagnosed.

It's hard to know what to do but we are going to assume this is not going to be as quick as pancreatic cancer was, and keep our lives going a bit

One of our family members has had prostate cancer which spread to his bones for over 12 years now!

He has had to have very regular monitoring, some sort of tablets and a few courses of chemo over the years, but his doctor basically said it was unlikely to be the thing that killed him as despite the spread, it’s slow growing and (largely) controlable.

He is 80 now!

Based on how DFIL is doing now, I could
We'll believe that he will last another few years at least. Even with pancreatic being a 2 week death sentence, we still had a good year of general poor health, pain, lethargia etc. I might be wrong but DFIL has responded amazingly well to the drugs (markers immediately went right down to levels only slightly above that over the average man without cancer) so I really get the feeling it will be something he dies with, not of. But DMIL now feels like she can't even go for an evening out with friends without him and certainly not away for the weekend which is something she used to do, so she potentially has years of putting her life on hold now. I really struggle with the rationale of not asking a prognosis as this would help her love her life in the interim

It would be insane to ask for a prognosis when his cancer is well controlled and there's plenty of evidence to suggest that it can be controlled long term. I suspect that the doctors couldn't even give him a prognosis based on their experience of seeing men living with it from months to decades.

A prognosis isn't going to help your mother in law live her life. What will help her is understanding he's living with and not dying from cancer and that unless the numbers or scans tell her differently he's going to be living with it for the foreseeable. He's certainly not going to deteriorate into serious illness if she goes out with her friends for an evening or away for a weekend. She needs support and counselling to help her live with the uncertainty, a prognosis won't help. It sounds like she's still in shock and processing it. It really is a different beast to pancreatic cancer or other more aggressive cancers and we all think the word stage 4 cancer and that it's automatically the end when actually some of them, pancreatic / testicular / some lymphoma's are really controllable if not curable at very late stages and you're far more likely to live with than die from them