Hi Samkl

Royal North Shore.

Completely irrelevant to your question but something I noticed in your posts, I remember you said you were trying to get Simon on the forum but you also said he doesn't want the details. Very few "teams" have more than one person on the forum. It seems that the person who needs to know the ins and outs of everything before it happens is the person that ends up on the forum. The person who just wants to get through is less likely to hit the boards.

My Alex is/was like Simon and refused to get on the forum at first. He trusted me to "sanitise" the information and drip feed him with the necessary information as he needed it. His greatest fear was that he would be unable to deal with what he read on this forum. I have learned the "head in the sand" technique is a common one and is the only way some people can cope with this.

Over time, I learned which stories on the forum resonated with Alex either in terms of attitude or similarity in issues and shared the posters' pearls of wisdom when appropriate. There were nights in hospital where I would repeat what I could remember of a particular string and we would laugh till we cried over some of the comments and humourous side tracks from topic. Others have printed out material and left it around for reading. Alex is now registered to the forum and lurks regularly but never writes but this is an unusual thing to have both survivor and carer on the forum.

From this forum I learned that I should back off sometimes, and that too much advice is overwhelming and annoying. I often thought Alex was making life more difficult for himself but had to accept that at the end of the day it IS his life and I have a duty to do what he wants, not what I think is best. I failed miserably trying to adhere to this, but it is always on my mind usually 2 seconds AFTER I open my mouth and stick my foot in it.

You are clearly a caring, hands on sister, who is desperate to help Simon with everything in you even though you are 2000 miles away. He knows this, but when he is in pain, or frightened, or distraught, he may forget momentarily and be a little insensitive to your efforts. If this happens, remember it is not your brother but the pain or the cancer or the fear driving it.