3 Strategies to Support Your Family When You Have Cancer

I remember the moment the doctor told me I had cancer and how I had an overwhelming feeling to run away. My fight or flight response kicked in and I had this instinct to get to safety. In that moment I needed to be at home with my family. I called my husband, who was out with our sons and told him I needed him to come home. I drove myself home. I don’t even remember that drive. I just needed to get home. I needed to be safe. When my husband walked in he knew immediately that something was wrong. I just looked at him and told him I had cancer. We only had a few minutes before the boys walked through the door to prepare ourselves.  They walked in, saw us, and immediately knew something was wrong. Our oldest son went to what would be his go-to for the next year by saying, everything’s going to be ok. Our youngest got quiet and went to his room.

There is no rule book on how to tell your kids that their world is about to be completely flipped upside down. There is no easy way to tell them that their parent has cancer. Everything changed in a matter of 30 minutes in our life and it has never been the same. Some days were a version of normal, some were a total gong show. What I know is we all did our best and we learned how to dance this dance of cancer in a way that worked for our family.

There are 3 things we discovered worked well for us to support our family. I believe that these were our lifeline and ended up bringing us together at a time when we could have all gone in separate directions. Today we are a very close family.

Communication is key

From the minute we learned I had cancer we shared openly what was happening and next steps with our boys. They were always given information about upcoming tests and results before anyone else was told. It was important to us that they feel involved and respected in the process. We didn't always shared all of the details. We learned what their tolerances were by watching them and listening to them. We were selective about how far we went into risks of surgery, side effects, and our own fears as we still wanted to protect them. It was also important to us to give them the space to say what they needed to say and to allow them to openly communicate with us. They might remember it differently, but we were figuring it out one appointment and one day at a time with no guide.

Open communication became one of our tenants and it still is today.

Keep life as normal as possible

Normal is an interesting metric when you have cancer. Nothing really seems normal anymore, which is why we tried to hold on to how things had been so the boys would have some consistency. 

Eating together as a family had always been part of our daily routine. Meals were always together and at the dinner table and for the most part, that didn’t change. It may seem like a little thing, but there is a lot you can learn when you sit together and share a meal.

We kept their routines around school and extracurricular activities normal. The boys were encouraged to spend time with their friends and do the activities they enjoyed as we didn’t want them to slip into hiding in their rooms and feeling isolated.

We did our best to keep them moving forward by doing what we could in the moment. Having rules, expectations and boundaries helped the boys to find their way and, although they may not have understood it at the time, to feel some safety and security in those structures.

Have fun right now

We started a practice that we call Mandatory Family Fun Days. This was something that we did before cancer when our boys would go away to summer camp. Before they went away we would pick a day that we all had to block off to be together as a family. Then we would pick an activity and go out for a day of fun and food.

We kept up this tradition even when I was going through my initial surgeries and treatment. We went golfing, we went on a kayaking adventure, we did escape rooms, and after a recurrence showed up in my body, we went axe throwing.

Our boys may not have known it at the time, and I don’t think my husband and I actually said it out loud, but we knew what we were doing. We were making memories. We were giving the boys memories of the four of us together having fun, just in case…

These 3 things that we did to support our family made a difference in how we navigated cancer as a family. It wasn’t perfect, but we were doing the best we could with what we had and we were determined not to let cancer take the time that we had away from us.

At the end of the day what could have broken our family brought us closer together and cancer changed our lives in a good way.