Memories of Max - A Father's Story

Chapter 2 - The Unit

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I had been writing to a friend's family for about a year. We never met but I wanted to do something to help them come to terms with their child's leukaemia. They had exactly the same questions, worries and foreboding thoughts about their child’s illness that we’d had. I answered as honestly as I knew how and tried be as supportive as possible and let them feel that they were not alone in their thoughts. When Max was diagnosed with his second cancer I did not know what to do. I had been as positive as possible and now I was being proved wrong. How could I tell them that Max had relapsed? How could I destroy whatever hope I might have given them? In the end I did nothing. I did not know what to say. We received a very caring letter from the family after the news eventually reached them.

About a week before Max was diagnosed with his second cancer I saw an appeal for funds for the Royal Marsden Children’s Unit posted on the wall in work. I read it and discovered that the child of another member of my company had just been diagnosed with leukaemia. I was very upset and made a donation to a fund which had been set up in support of childhood cancer. I also rang the family to offer support and explained my closeness to their particular situation.

Two weeks later I was to meet the same family in the Children’s Unit. Again how do you tell the family that your son has a new cancer? You try to will these families through their ordeal. How do you break the news of your own failure to get by? I knew neither of these families personally and yet we had a vital, awful commonality.

Relapse is not just another case of cancer. It signifies a significant worsening of your child's chances of survival. If the drugs failed to eradicate the disease the first time then it is harder to clear the body of the disease the second time. After Max's leukaemia I felt an sickening emptiness every time I heard of a relapse. Sometimes it would be of a child we knew in the Unit, sometimes friends of friends. You pray for them all.

As a parent of a relapsed child there is also the ordeal of going back into the hospital and meeting the 'before' families. These were the families of children who also had cancer when Max had his leukaemia. There was the strange paradox of being glad to see old and close friends and realisation that their presence almost induced depression because it amplified the desperation of your own and their situation.

Class Four in my sad categorisation is when a child dies. As newcomers to the Unit we heard very little or no talk by other parents about children who had died. There was a sensitivity shown to the parents of the newly diagnosed because the one thing which is uppermost in your mind is ‘Will my child survive?’

As we became more integrated into the life of the Unit, we heard of past deaths and became aware of those which occurred while we were there. A death is never mentioned by the staff who try to shield parents from the knowledge. Like the school grapevine, the news spreads quickly. The news is crushing and affects everyone, parents and staff alike. A quiet emptiness pervades the Unit.

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