my brother is 25. mediastinal yolk sac tumor, stage 4. they took out a 16cm tumor last year. now it's relapsing and the only treatment left is high dose chemo and the success rate isn't great.

i think about what he's processing. he's 25. he just started his life. now he's googling survival rates at night. he's deciding whether to tell his friends or keep it quiet. he's wondering what it means to keep planning a future when the future might not happen. he says he's fine when we ask. i don't think he's fine. i don't know how anyone could be.

and then there's my mom. she's been a caregiver her whole life. my dad had cancer when they got married. her own mom got lung cancer, then liver cancer. now my brother. she's processing the same thing he is, just from outside it. wondering if she's done enough. wondering if she's missing something. reading research papers at 2am about a cancer almost nobody has heard of.

on top of that grief and fear she also has to be a full time admin person. three patient portals. forwarded pharmacy texts. lab pdfs in her email. voicemails. notebooks everywhere. she missed an oncology callback last week because the voicemail got buried under pharmacy refill texts. she logs into mychart, then a different hospital portal, then her email looking for the lab pdf, then back to mychart.

i think people don't realize that the people who love a cancer patient go through their own version of it. not the same, not worse, not less. different. patients carry their body. caregivers carry the weight of trying to hold someone together while they're also breaking. both of them are processing what it means to maybe not have more time. and they all still have to function. cook dinner. go to work. answer texts.

i kept watching my mom do this and started building a small app for the admin part of it. yarow.vercel.app if anyone is curious.

mostly posting because i wanted to ask. does anyone else feel this. the double weight of it. watching someone you love process the worst news of their life while also processing it yourself. and somehow being expected to function.

Good catch. MyChart is a US thing (Epic). In Canada you'd be dealing with provincial systems and clinic-specific portals. Let me swap those references for something Canadian-accurate but generic enough to resonate.

In Canada the equivalent experience is more like:

• Logging into MyChart (different unrelated platform — wait, actually it's MyChart Canada in some Ontario hospitals too, but limited)
• More commonly: Ocean, Connect Care (Alberta), MyHealth Records (Alberta), Health Myself, or just the specific clinic's patient portal
• Most Canadians describe it as "the hospital portal" or "the clinic portal" because there are so many disconnected ones

I'll just say "the hospital portal" or "patient portal" generically. That's how most Canadians actually talk about it anyway.

Reddit, r/CancerCaregivers

Title: the part of cancer nobody talks about

>