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Our daughter had cancer

	Karen and Terry’s daughter Bethany, now six, was diagnosed with cancer when she was three years old – impacting the whole family.

When we were told that Bethany had leukaemia, we couldn’t come to terms with it at first, due to the shock of it all. We couldn’t figure out why – why Bethany, and why us? We knew so little about childhood cancer that I would pick up every leaflet and every bit of information I could. We had a huge learning curve.


	The children needed stability from us. They needed us to be open, honest and understanding.

The children, especially Bethany, needed stability from us. They needed us to be open, honest and understanding, and to know things were going all right, that we’d get through whatever the outcome was. Telling them as much information as possible and answering all their questions was very important. It helped everyone to know what was going on and helped us support each other better. We talked everything through with Bethany before she had her treatment. When Bethany was being treated, it was very demanding, and it was also very hard on the other siblings because they had to take a backseat.

One thing I did was make sure when we were at home we spent meal times together, which we hadn’t always done before. Focusing on family and communication was much more important than the hustle and bustle of day to day activities. When something like cancer happens to your child, money’s not the ‘be all end all’ – just being together and coming out the other side is. We appreciate life a bit more and it has made us stronger as a family.

We’re really proud of our children. They’ve coped with it better than we thought they could. They also had support from the Siblinks website. That opened a door for them to find out about other young people’s experiences.

There are lots of organisations to help you talk about your situation, like Macmillan, who can give advice and support to help you cope. We think it’s important to keep focused on the positive things and talk at every opportunity about how we’re feeling.