Suspect friend lied about parent having cancer

[MelloYellow]

Hello just wanting to get some opinions
im a 43 F who lost their DH to cancer.
I reconnected with an old friend and he’s lovely but a bit much - I’ve had to tell him about coming on too strong and he’s apologised.
He lives a few hours away and over Christmas he said he was coming to our home town in the new year,I wasn’t really feeling like meeting and then he told me his step mum had just been told she had cancer.He told me she had a lump ,and the consultant told her it was definitely cancer ,he had said he suspects stage 4,said about survival rates and her notes etc said cancer.
Fast forward to this week and suddenly she doesn’t have cancer ,they got it wrong .I suspect now it was said to get my attention.AIBU? Or Culf a consultant get it this wrong.Cancer is obviously very triggering for me.

I was all prepped to hear I had breast cancer and could be quite far along… it turned out to be a gland inflamed in my boob likely from my flu and covid vaccine. They saw an increase that year. The day I had the one stop shop appointment I was actually in for only 2 hours before being given the all clear but dh and I both took a day off work expecting to be dealing with the worst.

my parents have also both actually had cancer in the last year (mum now clear but dad’s is stage 4 and controlled but not curable). They have had so much confusing info.

friend might be lying but might not. sounds like you need to pull back from him though.

I’d imagine that’s highly unusual though.
thankyou for this though

Thankyou for this
all the best to your dad xxx

This ❤️

He doesnt sound very nice Op
He's doing exactly the opposite to what you asked him

If its not true he's a bloody psychopath

Advice you didnt ask for so disregard if you wish
Don't get drawn into questioning things like this, just quietly note this and move on.
Men like this love to drag you into their nonsense and gaslight and argue.
Its absolutely classic that he's now deflecting from his behaviour by picking you up on the word "odd" ,this is a strategy used to deflect that he has lied and now he is the victim
Ugh grim

Yes he’s now being ignored I have asked him to stop contact

Thankyou so much for this.
Again ,like in children and young adults ,the picking up of a word I’ve used to make that the issue is highly telling of someone who is being dishonest.
He is now blocked.

Absolutely trust your gut and stay away. So sorry about your DH x

You just know don’t you when someone is lying .

What happened over Xmas then - did you agree to see him because you believed him about his step mum?

Yes basically

That is one of the most weird text message conversations I've ever seen! He went from saying 'I'm not being rude' to 'I seriously ent being rude'...

My wife was told she had bowel cancer. Then two weeks later, no, sorry it's Crohn's.

Trust your gut, and the evidence.
BTW, you can set your phone to allow notifications only from certain contacts ie DCs when your phone is otherwise silenced. I have this set for my DCs.

That also happened to me.

I think you probably need to drop this and step away.

As someone with cancer, I think it’s very easy to catastrophise. The consultant may very well have not said this, but stepmum may be incredibly anxious and have catastrophised all sorts from an initial investigation.

I know before I was officially diagnosed, the GP said I think it’s this, then got to the hospital and consultant said, I think it’s this, and then they did the biopsy and it turned out to be something else, and then I had to have another biopsy and the staging changed. I truly thought I was going to die and had less than 2 years. I’m not dead yet and it’s been a year and a half already!

If you’d asked Dh or anyone else in my family, they would have gotten it totally wrong. Even now, I don’t think Dh would be able to explain what stage I am or name the lymph nodes I’ve had removed. You seem like a very invested daughter, but I’m not sure that’s necessarily how everyone is.

My dad died of cancer too and I only vaguely know what sort. It was stage 4, but I don’t know where. If you’d have asked I would have totally gotten it all wrong.

Maybe he’s a weirdo, maybe this is too much for you right now, but I wouldn’t necessarily assume he made it all up. I’d assume he probably just doesn’t know much about cancer. Most people don’t until they have no choice.

This sounds really suspicious. You've already had to tell him to back off. He's trying to weasel his way into your life and using a false cancer diagnosis to do it because he knows your husband died of it.

It might be different where you are, but here, the norm is patient gets biopsied and are told the results when they come back and staging is done after scans. They don't just remove something and say stage IV whatever cancer. I will say I was told I possibly had leukemia because my white counts and diffs were weird but they did further testing to determine the cause, which was my body's response to pregnancy.

That's really manipulative and repugnant.

Just send him a last email to not contact you again in any way and block him for good. He's a liar and he's pushy and doesn't respect boundaries and that's just as a long distance friend.

I'm sorry for your loss.

Putting the cancer/lying thing aside, just an objective observation here, you’re definitely being antagonistic and somewhat rude in that second screenshot. You’re antagonising him and then flipping out on him when he responds to what you’ve said.
Either way, it doesn’t sound like a strong, mutually respectful friendship tbh.

Sorry but you say he has adhd tho you can kindof tell by messages he isn't fully alert mentally and many many people are told daily it could be this cancer or that and immediately they think the worst until tests are done officially again not a good or bad thing it's humans being human. All I see tbh is you not taking above factors into any consideration and becoming rude yourself and actually even worse should his family member have any sort of cancer then saying it's not true which realistically you neither know as fact or not either. So tbh it's not the guy I see in the wrong, so obvious he has mh issues and that you don't

I would think consultants are more likely get it wrong by saying it’s not cancer when it is. This happened to both dh and me on our cancer diagnoses. But I’ve heard of it the other way round too. Staging changes quite often too. And I know of some who were told they had metastatic cancer which then proved not to be.

Perhaps your friend exaggerated but I personally know one patient who was told he had kidney cancer and a fortnight later that he doesn't , and another who was told that she had months to live and then that she's actually fine. In both cases test results were misinterpreted. So it can happen.

My relative was recently told they had a particularly aggressive form of cancer (which implied very limited time left) and it turned out not to be on further testing. It does happen. And how do you know he wasn't summarizing or repeating what he'd been told with bits left out, I doubt he would have given you a step by step of everything the consultants had done?

I am really sorry for the loss of your husband and I am sure this is extremely triggering, you can also back away from your friend for any reason you like, but I am not sure it's clear he is making this up. You also do seem to aggressively interrogating him in that email exchange, while he seems quite taken aback.

thankyou
yes there are lots of maybes ,but the fact remains he’s very strange so best to put a pin in it! X

So I’m in the wrong.

You dont know if it started with she found a lump, and had all the investigations by the point this was said.

I had a mole and my consultant said it was cancer.

What I haven't written is I was sent to have it looked at, then had a biopsy and the results said it was cancer. All removed, no further treatment required