When Is Enough Enough?
When my kids were little I was faced with a situation of a visiting family member who was going through leukemia treatment. I knew they would be concerned and probably even scared at how much this person changed since they saw him last with hair loss, weight loss and a chest port. I couldn’t decide what to tell them but knew I had to prepare them somehow. They were 4 and 6. Old enough to be affected, not old enough to understand.
I asked other mom’s for advice and although I didn’t know what the answer was that I was looking for I did know that each of them had good intentions but not the right answer for me. Until one person said, “tell them enough to get started in a conversation and let them ask questions. If they want to hear more, they’ll ask more. When they’ve had enough or it gets to be too much, they’ll stop asking.”
As a cancer patient I couldn’t relate to this more!
Some people want as much information as they can get so they feel prepared and know what’s coming. I felt like I was getting overwhelmed and even scared with all the information I didn’t need to hear, the possibilities that didn’t apply to me, other’s experiences that were their own and not related to mine, and more scary information that I knew how to emotionally handle at a time.
I got most of my information from my doctors and nurses, learning about my chemo from a program they have called “Chemo Teach” and a few reliable articles from online websites. I can turn the internet off when it gets to be too much. I can close a book. It’s a lot harder to stop my friends and family. I had to ask people not to talk about their horror stories or tell me what was “going to happen to me” because I would worry for nothing only for it to not even apply.