Apart from this, parents become susceptible to a number of different emotional mood swings brought about by the news and treatment of their child who has been diagnosed with ALL. The first of the wave of emotions experienced by parents upon learning the diagnosis of the child is confusion which is then followed by a sense of denial. Feelings of denial are brought about by the fact that parents cannot accept that their child has been diagnosed with a chronic and terminal illness.
In order to find some consolation and hope, parents would often seek a second opinion from another physician to determine the validity of the diagnosis provided to them earlier is indeed correct. This is then followed by a feeling of guilt and helplessness, especially during the entire treatment since the changes brought about by the diagnosis of the child suffering from ALL would mean that the child would have to undergo numerous treatments and would be unable to experience a number of things that their child’s peers do (Keene).
As it was mentioned earlier in this paper, while ALL is commonly found among children, there are a number of adults in the United States that are diagnosed to be inflicted with this disease. In cases such as this, it is the child that would be experiencing various effects on his or her social life as well. In most cases, children are often left confused about the condition faced by their parent and the changes in their parent’s physical features brought about by the various treatments the parent would be subjected to.
Another reason for the confusion faced by the child is with regards of the treatment procedures itself. Parents have trained their child to believe that taking in medicines and certain forms of drugs prescribed by a doctor is meant to cure a particular ailment or disease. However, since treating a patient diagnosed with ALL would often cause the patient to become weaker after the procedure, the child is left to question as to why the medicine or drug being administered is making his or her parent more ill.
The confusion faced by the child would often not just cause the child to emotionally and physically withdraw from his or her parent undergoing treatment for ALL. In fact, majority of the cases where children of individuals diagnosed with ALL and other forms of cancer have been found to exhibit distress behavior symptoms during the procedural phase of the treatment. Moreover, it has been determined that girls tend to exhibit more distress behaviors as opposed to boys (Brooks; LaMontagne, Wells, Hepworth, Johnson and Manes 3).