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by munk-a
1692 days ago
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So, personally speaking, my mother has had breast cancer - and my dad has gone through a hat-trick. Prostate cancer in his mid fifties, kidney cancer about two years ago (in his seventies) and a pretty slow moving lung cancer about six months ago (that won't get him for quite a while so we're not doing anything about it). For my mother the cancer was caught early but still resulted in a mastectomy - an operation that can be emotionally difficult but thankfully was early enough to be a complete elimination. For my father the prostate cancer was caught relatively early and surgery and light kemo got him through - the kidney cancer was the really close scare with it coming on undetected until stage three when he was having appetite issues due to the mass blocking his GI functions - surgery and heavy drug use was required in treatment but the surgery was risky enough that me and my brother flew in to take care of household things and help mom and pop through it. I tend to compartmentalize quite heavily, I have friends at work I explained it all to - and one of them lent me some extremely emotional graphic novels that helped me get a lot of my weeping out on my flight over to my family then I could focus on emotional and physical care. I kept working up until the day of my flight and buried myself in work - I'm sure I wasn't the most efficient employee during that stretch but it helped me to surround myself with a problem space that I could solve. The difficulty with being a developer is that we can solve so many insanely weird and obscure problems that it becomes habit forming much to the detriment of the health of our relationships and our mental health during existential crises. When a family member has cancer you can assist with everything that's do-able but the actual solutions come from the doctors and pure fucking chance - so my best advice to cope with the issues is that you can help in the small ways and it's immensely appreciated. Cook meals, play games (when my dad was sequestered for surgery we, the family, were sent home since it was a long operation - he had his smart phone and was changing the color of the smart bulbs in the house when conscious) and listen to requests. If you're feeling overwhelmed then talk to your manager and go on bereavement leave or else just take some unpaid time - if your company isn't the absolute worst then hopefully people above you will understand that you just need time to sort yourself out. If you need to quit then do it - but avoid it if you can because that can just be added stress. I don't know if any of this was helpful - but I hope everything goes well for you, it's an extremely painful process (he types while tearing up). |
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