Tumour in Emmerdale

[sammason]

In the UK soap opera I watch, Emmerdale, a story is going on about a brain tumour. As so often, they're not telling us what will happen, and I usually prefer not to know in advance. If you don't want to know what happened a few weeks ago, don't click this link.I've no personal experience, unlike the actor whose character (Brenda) has the tumour.

Comments

[sammason]

Most of these stories are awful. I'm sorry that you and yours have faced these horrors.

Going back to the Emmerdale story: brain tumour is being portrayed as an acute problem, life-threatening in the immediate future, easily fixed by an operation. The operation is described as 'sawing into the skull' with no mention of keyhole surgery and no mention of possible relapse into more cancer.

Thank you for telling us more reality. Soap operas do need to keep their storylines quite simple but I'm now thinking that this particular one has been oversimplified.

The story moved on after I started this thread. Brenda now has noticeable symptoms - she's become forgetful, she had an 'episode' which looked (from my inexpert viewpoint) to be an absence seizure but which was described in the script as 'nodding off'.

We're still getting a story all about whether or not the decisions are hers, and hers alone. I'm not convinced by that, to tell the truth. I find that people's lives are intertwined, so what somebody like Brenda does will affect her daughter, grand-daughter, boyfriend and so on. Brenda is a 'people person' who I'd expect to be more concerned about her family than we're seeing in the story. In last night's episode of the soap, she and her boyfriend discussed her tumour in graphic terms while his young children listened.

[cariadwen]

I think it depends on where the tumour is, as to how they can operate. I hardly think that Sion's tumour could have been accessed through his ear, like that of my Grove leader. All operations hold a risk even if it's one of the more ordinary ones like a hernia. It all depends on the surrounding factors.

I'm disturbed to hear that the characters discussed it in front of the children. I'm not saying the children shouldn't know about it but a detailed discussion should I believe be between adults.

[sammason]

I thought so too. We did see the kids looking round as they listened. It wasn't the usual way for this soap, in which kids are routinely sent 'upstairs to play on your new computer game' when the adults want to talk about adult matters. So you never know, we might get a dramatic scene with one of the kids asking Brenda to have her op.