What Not to Say to the Parent of a Child with Cancer

My son was diagnosed with brain cancer in April 2006, just a month after his tenth birthday. Even though he was flown from San Antonio to Houston, TX - to MD Anderson Cancer Center no less - it took me a couple of days to get it through my head that my child had cancer. I kept thinking, "It's going to be a benign
'growth' . . . nothing malignant." Seriously, how could my perfectly healthy son have cancer, right?

Wrong. Keeghan's tumor was malignant. But after two surgeries, six weeks of radiation, and a year (so far) of chemotherapy, he is tumor free. It will be my daily - hourly? - wish, for the rest of my life, that he stays that way.

One of the hardest things to deal with when your child has cancer is the way in which other people react when you tell them, and the things that they say. It has been proven to me time after time that most people really don't think before they open their mouths. They'll say things like, "Oh, I knew someone that had the "c" word. She died."

The "c" word. I've heard cancer referred to that way numerous times, as though actually saying it would cause a person to get it. It's not contagious people!

At the grocery store one day, with Keeghan standing by my side, the cashier asks me, "Did he have an accident?"

Keeghan has a very large scar on the side of his head. It's a nice scar as far as scars go. It's perfectly symmetrical - four inches up on one side, five inches across, and another four inches down on the other side. It's so perfect that my husband used to joke and say that it looked like a trap door. He'd tease Keeghan by telling people that that was where he kept his wallet.

So to be asked if he had an accident seemed pretty ludicrous. "Yes, he fell out of a tree and landed on a cookie cutter. Hence the perfect scar."

I wish I had replied that way, but alas, I didn't. "He had a brain tumor," I say instead.

"Oh . . . is he going to be okay?" she then whispers.