Telling our other kids

Even though this blog really focuses on Hannah, there are two other VERY special kids that share our lives. I choose to keep their lives out of this blog because I’ve decided to only bring them in when it pertains to Hannah. After all, this is my current therapy for this whole situation.

Big Boy E is 8 years old, and Little Girl A is almost 5.

We gently broke it to the kids that Hannah is sick. They know she has gone to a lot of doctor’s appointments because of her big tummy. We told them that she has a problem inside her body, and that she has to get medicine every two weeks poked into her arm, and it is not going to be fun for her. We also said that she has a lot of doctors working for her to get her “fixed up.” That was the extent of it. Little Girl A was like “okay, love you Hannah!”. Big Boy E asked a few more questions but nothing “deep.” Just more about the procedure.

We also explained that we are going to be doing a lot of stuff to help the doctors work to find better medicines for Hannah, fundraisers, visits to specialists, etc. When Big Boy E asked what he could do to help, I didn’t know what to say. So Daddy said “you can stuff envelopes that we have to send out.” He was cool with that, but of course Little Girl A wants to do that too! Now we just need to find something to stuff into an envelope!

We never mentioned the possible future symptoms, physical or neurological, that she may encounter or the possibility of her being taken away from us much earlier than she should be. That is just stuff we didn’t feel they needed to know. If future symptoms come up, we’ll deal with that as it happens.

I think we handled it pretty well. I’m satisfied. We’ll answer questions as they come up, but we are only going to tell them as much as we think they can handle at each of their ages.

Someone needs to write a guidebook on how to deal with a rare chronic illness diagnosis…