Evening,
I have been diagnosed with hodgkin's lymphoma stage 2.I am about to begin 6 months of chemotherapy once every 2 weeks
I have 2 children ages 6 and 10. My 10 year old son has autism. We have tried to explain to them both what is going on but I am unsure if the really understand it all.
Does anyone have any advice on how else we can explain it to then a little more as they are aware I'm about to enter some hard times but not sure they understand why.
Thanks in advance
Hi , and welcome to the family and friends group.
My wife's cancer is quite different as she has Leiomyosarcoma but can share the experience of having a child with autism, one thing that quite worried us was her cancer is incurable and lots of the books we found talked about cancer being cured - having said that Janice's cancer has been stable now for six years so she is doing incredibly well.
Macmillan do have quite a good collection of resources on talking to children about cancer and we also got a lot of support from school to help ensure Michael got a fairly consistent message.
We did introduce Michael to our local Maggie's centre who have been quite helpful. One of the quite useful books we found too was "The secret C - straight talking about cancer" by Julie Stokes - hopefully your local library should be able to get hold of a copy for you.
When Michael was a bit older (he is nearly 16 now) we asked him if he had any worries, after a bit of thought he asked what would happen to him if something happened to me too - fortunately our wills already named Janice's brother as guardian and he already has an adopted son - this seemed to reassure him.
At the moment of course with all the coronavirus speculation in the news poor Michael is really worrying that we are going to die - very helpful as he is doing his GCSE's.
Hopefully the people in the lymphoma group will help to reassure you that people do get through chemotherapy, those stories can be really helpful to show there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
<<hugs>>
Steve
