This is Our Child: How Parents Experience the Medical World

Today's parents expect to have healthy babies, but when traumatic illness strikes a child, parents are frequently thrust into a situation that seems alien and unfriendly. Medical personnel, complex explanations, complicated machinery, and medications can all combine to present an overwhelming load of new information with which to cope. Everyone is under stress: parents and immediate family of the patient, doctors and nurses, and the patient himself. Death or suffering in children are tremendously difficult situations to handle. Families, friends, and health professionals as well may avoid facing their emotions, and it is often difficult to find practical support or sympathetic help. This collection of accounts by parents and teenagers gives a personal insight into their experience of the medical world, each followed by a brief medical perspective. The book will be helpful to all professionals working with children. Through descriptions of how others have endured, coped with and eventually survived, the book will also help families of children with traumatic illness or injury facilitate discussion with the professionals involved.