My dad died from colon cancer when I was 10. It left my entire family traumatized (pt. 2)

AstroAmari

This is my second post, and I think I'm in a better place mentally.

If you didn't see my last post, hi, I'm Amelie. My dad was cancer survivor Tom Marsilje. Some of you might know who he was. I think he was pretty well known throughout the colorectal cancer community and was on TV a couple of times.

To put what my family and him went through into perspective, I no longer like to say he died from cancer. Because sure, the cancer treatment he went through was terrible, but it was nothing compared to the last six months of his life. My dad died from liver failure, from tumors in his liver. If your a cancer survivor, DO NOT LET IT GET INTO YOUR LIVER. It's basically game over if you let it happen. (Maybe not but it's still very bad). Basically what we suspect happened is he tried a cancer treatment which was very rough on him (he was basically vomiting uncontrollably, i didn't see this but my mom did) and we suspect it caused the cancer in his liver to go crazy. If anything seems out of the ordinary with your treatment, please don't hesitate to try something new)

His hair was falling out, his skin was plastered to his bones, his eyes were popping out, his skin was flaky, and he could barely recognize any of us. This was about a month or two before his death. But even still, the last six months were awful. He was getting thinner and less of himself by the day. The one good thing is he stopped vomiting at around the last 5 months.

After he died in November 2017, (he was 45 and I was 10) my mom was suffering from severe PTSD and I was suffering from just enormous screaming and crying episodes and PTSD for about a year. My mom still has PTSD and I have minor PTSD and severe emotional numbness from it (from trying to supress it because people didn't get it)

I've been working on it with my therapist, through it I also realized I was heavily dissassociating pretty much the entire 5 years he was sick (mostly depersonalization with some isolated cases of derealization at the end). I've tried removing the layers of depersonalization and it's super distressing and painful. I sometimes get woozy and start dissassociating if I think about it too much. I sometimes wish I could go back to not really feeling anything. I have been diagnosed with depression, anxiety, and autism but could also have cyclothymic disorder, borderline personality disorder, a psychotic disorder, and OCD.

I sometimes get worried when I hear about other families of cancer patients because I get worried my mom and I were overreacting and that it was just grief (which the world views as not that bad). Because my dad's illness and his death completely wrecked me for a year or two (until I suppressed it so much that I went numb). I just want to make sure I'm not overreacting.

Thank you,

Amelie Marsilje