The diagnosis aftermath.

When life throws you a curveball, you have options. You can't always see them straight away though. Sometimes you have to let the dust settle, which is exactly what we did.

Our inital feelings are hard to put into words. For Tony, fear, shock. He's a brilliant problem solver and his first instinct was that he needed to get his affairs in order, plan for the worst. 

That's the issue with Cancer. It's scary, we don't talk about it. We hear a stage and assume death sentence. Instantly envisioning hair loss, sunken eyes. I think it's ingrained into us, yet we forget how far treatment and technology have come over the year.

I was terrified, anticipatory grief. Intrusive thoughts about what was about to him, Chemo, illness. The fear of losing him, seeing him in pain. Again, negative connotations that instantly jump to mind. 

One thing that might sound strange is how the thought or idea of losing the person you love is horrific, it hurts in a way I don't know how to describe. That's a dark place to need to visit. In that darkness though, there's a glimmer of light, a little gem that in recent weeks i've learned to hang on to and cherish. I realised I love this man so deeply, so intently, that the idea of him suffering or not being here burns my soul. In those thoughts I found motivation and strength, desire and fight.

Tony and I deal with things in sightly different ways. Tony treats things as a puzzle, a Rubix cube. He'll pick a problem up, puzzle and play with it for a while. Put it down and ponder, and then go back to it. Very Einstein.

I tend to shut down, dissapear into my head and resurface once i'm ready to and i've figured things out. Very bog troll.

We duvet'd that weekend. Just crashed out. Put nonsense on the TV, dragged the duvet onto the sofa and did as little as possible.

I threw myself into research (yes, everyone says DO NOT GOOGLE, and I agree with that, there are too many horror stories on the ol'Google.) By research i mean study. Lack of information makes me anxious. The way I dealt with the diagnosis was to learn about the cancer, get to know my enemy, learn how to defeat it and how to cope through the journey we were about to embark on. Just as Bev said to me the day before, my man was going to need me, so I took it upon myself to learn all i could about what we were about to experience.

It's also really useful, or so I've found, to have an understanding of the words that will be used along the journey. It seems to put the medical teams at ease and helps the conversations with them seem much less baffling.

We spoke very little on the friday evening with words, though we spoke a thousand words through hugs and physical touch. I don't think either of us really knew how to put what we felt into words.

It's a very difficult thing to come to terms with, understand and get your head around. Our advice, take your time, sit with it. Don't rush, don't brush it off. Embrace the diagnosis. Strength and determination.

Mindset really does make a difference.

As saturday drew to a close, having had the day to mull things over, and the dust settle we started talking about it. We addressed the scary side of it, our fears, my glimmer in the darkness. Slowly working back towards the positives. 

One of the things our nurse said while giving us the news was ''treatment with a view to cure''. In the madness and the shock of the diagnosis, her words had gotten lost. ''With a view to cure''.... Brilliant! That means we can crush the little *£%*"$%!

As we talked more about things the positives Mel had said to us began to resurface. She'd spoken very positively about Tony's cancer. We'd forgotten that she said ''early stage 3'' not  ''stage 3''. She rhymed off a myriad of treatment options which would be available to us, all with a view to cure.

Amazing how the mind works, how you can miss things in a stressful moment, your brain only bringing the finer more positive points forward when you're calm. Try and be calm.

The more I learned, the more positive we became. We found a huge deal of support and positivity in a facebook group for people with this cancer and their families. Here's the link - Facebook Group .

People in the group discuss treatments, tips, stories of recovery. Exactly the sorts of things you need to read and hear when you're stuck in this arena.

That weekend was a reset for us. Face the monster. Examine it. Look it in the eyes.

We made the choice the best way for us to get through this was to break the big scary thing down in to smaller chunks. One step at a time.

Our next step was to be sent for a PET scan; this would allow the tumor to be staged and graded properly.