Excited to see my brother...

My brother is an avid anti-masker and I'm on chemo. He said that that's just the way natural selection works and anyone who has a generic weakness "deserves" to die. He also said that the quarantine isn't worth the cost to the economy impling that he'd rather have money than a living brother.

He's in town because my grandpa died but I think after the funeral I might have to cut him out of my life. With the chemo, pain, sickness, etc. I have enough negativity in my life I don't need more. It's just frustrating because we were close (he's a year and 8 days older than me). He even had my mother in tears and I tried saying, "let's agree to disagree," to which he yelled, "No!"

Anyways, sorry to vent. I haven't posted much but I believe people usually add something like, "this can die in usersub," on posts like this...

Edit: I'm surprised by how much this blew up and overwhelmed by how amazingly nice and supportive everyone has been. Thanks for all the kind words, support, offers to DM, etc. I know I've posted pieces of this in comments, but I've had the same questions asked a couple of times in comments and DMs so I thought I'd put the answers here.

Several people have asked what kind of cancer I have and here's the shorter answers (which is still pretty long). I have a weird presentation of an autoimmune disease called Sjogren's Syndrome, where your immune system attacks your salivary and tear glands. Usually this disease is f found in older women and they just have to take a pill or 2 and live with dry mouth and eyes, so my case being so severe plus me getting it when I was younger and I'm male which makes it an even odder presentation. I have to see an out of state Rheumatologist who does research into Sjogren's and related diseases. He actually refers to it as roboticKittenTamer's Disease because it's so unique. He's written medical journal articles for research he's done on my case. But it is behaving like a lymphoma so he's classified it as a "pseudo-lymphoma" and we've been using lymphoma treatments/chemos for about 11 years now (I first started showing symptoms in 2007 and had surgeries on my salivary glands, but my ENT didn't refer me to a Rheumatologist till 2009 and I'm 2010 I started seeing the out of state Rheumatologist and started chemo then). My Rheumatologist even shows my medical records to doctors all over the world when he's at conventions or wants a 2nd opinion. I've even been to hospitals like John's Hopkins to get experimental treatments. The bitch about it is I've always got pain in the sides of my face/neck (in front of my ears and down to the corner of my jaw and into my neck, where the parotid salivary glands are), it's just a matter of how much (lowest it gets is a 4 or 5, the worst is a 10). And I get flare ups where my pain just keeps getting worse until I take a large dose of IV steroids (usually 125 mg of solumedrol). I use to have to go to the ER every time I needed IV steroids but now I have chemo port (power port, and I have it accessed so the time/reaccessed every week by a bone health nurse) so I can give myself IV steroids at home. I use the frequency between flare ups to determine how well I'm doing. At the worst they got (probably summer of 2020) I was having a flare up ever 2 or 3 days. I was starting to do better on the latest chemo (Gazyva or obinutuzumab) but then I had to stop it in late November because I was hospitalized twice for pneumonia (the weekend before Thanksgiving and the weekend after) and then early December for kidney failure from the antibiotics (they think it was the vancomycin), but luckily I recovered and my kidneys bounced back without dialysis or damage and I'm starting the chemo back up again tomorrow.

What's my prognosis has also been asked a few times. This is hard to know since my condition is so unique there aren't really other cases we can look at to guess how I'll react to anything, but it's not likely to be directly terminal. But the treatments are slowly killing me/shortening my life (11+ years of high dose steroids and chemo are brutal on your body). So we've tried a bunch of chemos. Initially were found one that either for about a year and a half and then my body asked and it stopped working. We find another one that worked but quite as well, but it had me functional and working full time. After about 3.5 years it stopped working and for the past 5 years or so we've been trying to find another chemo that will work and we've tried radiation as well with out much luck.

I've also been asked how old he is a few times. He's 39 and I'm 38. I'm married with one kid and he's married with 3 kids.

Many people have suggested cutting him out now, and basically I have. My mom wanted me to bring my family up yesterday for dinner before my brother went home and I told her no and explained why. She was upset but said she understood and wants to try and fix things (I'm not sure that she can, but she's welcome to try). The only time I'll likely see him is at the funeral and viewing this next weekend which I guess he's flying back into town for. My dad said that he apologized to them but that I'm the one he needs to apologize to, but he hasn't tried to contact me.