I’m looking for serious advice from people who have had to deal with explaining to a child that a parent has or may have cancer.
My wife has been in the hospital for a few days while they try to diagnose her condition. At first they thought it was a uterine fibroid (there are threads on that condition elsewhere on the board, I’ll warn you that it may be TMI), but they’ve ruled it out. From initial pathology, indications are that it may be a lymphoma (type of cancer), but the doctors are still uncertain.
My 12 year old son is rather worried. He understands that any cancer may be life threatening, and specifically his aunt (my wife’s sister) died of a lymphoma some years ago. Whatever we find out in the next few days (as test results come back), it will be difficult for all of us, but I’m particularly worried about my son. Has anyone had to tell their child about this before? Or been in the child’s position? What will make this easier? (As if anything will, but I hope you know what I mean…) How do you break potentially bad news?
YOu and your wife need to talk to him together: if you talk to him privatly, he won’t know how to talk about it in front of his mom–he won’t know if he is supposed to keep ita secret of somehing.
Arm him with information–arm yourself, too. Be prepared for the questions you know he is going to ask–is mom gonna live, how bad does it hurt, what happens now? Show him web sites where he can do more reading on his own.
Be honest with him. He’ll need to know the truth, whatever it is.
He is likely gonna need to feel like he is helping, so make sure you give him chances to do so–if he offers to do something, almost anything, take him up on it, don’t say 'Oh, that’s ok, it dosen’t really matter" or “Oh, I’ll take care of it, you get some rest.” He needs to do things.
Good luck–cancer is always a scary thing, but treatment is much better than it was even five, ten years ago. if it has been a while since your wife’s sister died, you may want to point out to oyur son how much treatments have changed.
Having just gone through this with my brother in law and his 12 year old daughter (he was diagnosed with cancer as well) Manda Jo is 100% correct (and rocks, I might add! )
Also, I realize with you all it’s a different situation, but his daughter also showed a lot of anger - especially when she couldn’t see dad as he was getting treatments - we think it was just fear - her parents are divorced and she wasn’t going on any visitations while he was getting his treatments, but she went through a real rough, and very angry patch.
So far, they’re not really sure what it is. The pathologists are mostly certain it’s a lymphoma, except that it’s in the uterus, which isn’t normally a primary site for lymphoma (that’s scary right there). They’ve sent out for consult. Anyway, it’s difficult to be armed with information when they aren’t sure about exactly what the issue is.
On the other hand, we had several pieces of good news today - CAT scans showed no other tumor activity in her body, and the pathologists have ruled out the type (Burkett’s) that my sister-in-law had. On top of that, the doctors have decided that she’s in no immediate danger, so she was allowed home today - we’ll be at home for Christmas. (Big changes in travel plans, but we’ve dealth with it.)
We’ve been talking this over with my son, trying not to raise false hopes, but to allay the worst of his fears as well. Today’s news helped a lot - for all of our spirits. At the moment, the approach we’re taking is to hear the news from the doctor without my son (it’s kind of clinical), but then to tell him, translating into non-medical English, so that (hopefully) it will seem more understandable to him.
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