My mother-in-law has ovarian cancer.  Easy enough to tell that to you, but not so easy to tell my kids.  My husband and I have been struggling with just how and when to let them know.

Let me back up here for a minute.  We found out about a month ago.  We were going to tell the kids, but then decided to wait until we had more information.  Surely they were going to have questions--I mean they aren’t babies anymore.  Our daughter is 16 (and wants to be a biomedical engineer), the two boys are 14 and 11 1/2.  So I’m sure they will want to know the type and stage of the cancer, right?  Surgery was scheduled quickly after the diagnosis, so we thought, what the heck, let’s wait until the doctor gets in there and has a better idea of what the prognosis/diagnosis is.

The surgery went well, or so the doctor said.  But, that was all he said.  He did not give my mother-in-law any indication of the type or stage.  Ovarian cancer.  Removed uterus, ovaries, and some lymph nodes.  Didn’t see anything in other organs, but ordered 6 rounds of chemo to kill any microscopic cancer cells he might have missed.  He ordered some tests on the samples he removed.

So then we thought, let’s wait until we have those results back.  Then we will tell the kids.  No sense in getting them all worried when we still don’t know what we are looking at.

But the day of the next appointment, he did not give any results.  And he postponed the chemo.  The wait to tell the kids continued.

Then the day for my mother-in-law’s first treatment rolled around.  It went well, but again...no further information.  So again, we said nothing to the kids.  In the meantime, one of their friends’ grandmothers died (who had cancer) and another one of their friends’ fathers died (who had, you guessed it...cancer).  It’s tough to follow that kind of news with, “Oh...and Grandma also has cancer.”  So we didn’t.

Before her second treatment (which also went well) my mother-in-law told us that the doctor has the pathology report.  I’m assuming now that he’s had it all along.  But, she did not want to see it.  She says she doesn’t want to know what type or what stage her ovarian cancer is.  She plans to just do what he tells her and would rather not know anything else about it.

She has begun to lose her hair and is feeling rather run down.  This is par for the course with chemo.  We made plans to go see her for Thanksgiving, so we have to tell the kids something because otherwise, they are going to know the second they see her and I’m sure they will be angry with us for not having told them (and rightly so).

I personally would want to know everything I could about it if I were the patient here.  But, I am not.  And I have to respect my mother-in-law’s decision not to know.  I’m not sure why I’m posting this here...maybe I’m hoping someone will have a really great way to broach this subject with the kids.  I know they need to know.  I just don’t know how to tell them.