r/pediatriccancer • u/Agile_Jeweler_1567 • Jun 16 '25
My mental health is tanking.
How do I stop the anticipatory grief, the heavy feeling on my chest constantly? The anxiety and panic around hospital stays? I’m making myself sick with sadness and I can’t stop daydreaming about our old life, about my healthy toddler. Everything was ripped away from us with this diagnosis and I’m not coping. It seems that he’s reacting well to chemo, and his oncologist even mentioned remission by September but we have months long stay for stem cell transplant in October. I don’t know how to deal with any of this. I’m so sad all of the time. He has high risk neuroblastoma with the ALK mutation and it’s unfavorable. He has a massive tumor in his abdomen and some disease in one of his lymph nodes. It was found in his bone marrow but they didn’t see it in the MIBG. We have done 2 rounds of chemo.
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u/ilikeplants91 Jun 17 '25 edited Jun 17 '25
I second the recommendation for grief counseling, but also, try to find other parents who have been through the same thing. My DMs are always open - my daughter was diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer at 4 months old, and we're now almost a year into treatment.
One thing that helped me early on was my sense of responsibility to be happy for my daughter. Because I genuinely didn't know how long she had, I wanted to be the best parent I could for her, and that meant being as okay as I could for her. I'm not saying you should feel any shame or guilt for the way you feel, it's so important to be kind to yourself. And it's totally okay and normal to grieve the life that you had before diagnosis. But do your best to take things a day at a time, and not dwell on what might happen. Because you will have plenty of time to grieve if and when it does. I know all of that is much easier said than done, though.
I'm so sorry you are going through this.