Guilt

Guilt is a common and normal reaction to childhood leukemia. Parents feel that they
have failed to protect their child, and blame themselves. It is especially difficult because
the cause of their child’s cancer cannot be explained. There are questions: How could
we have prevented this? What did we do wrong? How did we miss the signs? Why
didn’t we bring her to the doctor sooner? Why didn’t we insist that the doctor do
blood work? Did he inherit this from me? Why didn’t we live in a safer place? Maybe I
shouldn’t have let him drink the well water. Was it because of the fumes from paint-
ing the house? Why? Why? Why? It may be difficult to accept, but parents need to
understand that it is very unlikely that they did anything to cause their child’s illness.
Years of research have so far revealed little about what causes childhood leukemia or
how to prevent it (see Chapter 2). Nancy Roach describes some of these feelings in
her booklet The Last Day of April:
Almost as soon as Erin’s illness was diagnosed, our self-recrimination
began. What had we done to cause this illness? Was I careful enough
during pregnancy? We knew radiation was a possible contributor; where
had we taken Erin that she might have been exposed? I wondered about
the toxic glue used in my advertising work or the silk screen ink used in
my artwork. Bob questioned the fumes from some wood preservatives
used in a project. We analyzed everything—food, fumes, and TV.
Fortunately, most of the guilt feelings were relieved by knowledge and by
meeting other parents whose leukemic children had been exposed to an
entirely different environment.