How to break news to parents and sister that I have brain cancer?

be straight forward with them. Can you see them in person? If so, call them adn tell them you need to come over to talk to them. Then just say, “mom, dad, I have some bad news. I have brain cancer.”

If you can only tell them on the phone, be straight-forward from the outset.

Honor their love and support by not trying to sugarcoat or gloss over what you’re telling them. Being vulnerable and open will allow them to be closer to you and help you.

You are in my prayers, I send you wishes for your health.

thanks… ill probably have to do it over the phone… i moved to NY for residency after finishing medical school in June so im a coast away from my family…

thanks for your suggestion…

First, I can understand why you are at a loss. Just reading your story sent me reeling for a few minutes. I haven’t had to do anything like this, but I know I wouldn’t want to do it over and over again with each individual. So I guess the first thing I’d do is let people know that I needed to see them all at the same time. I’d prepare them for the fact that it was bad news, but make it clear that I wasn’t going to talk about it until everyone was together.

Then I’d prepare answers to the most obvious questions in advance, which would mean thinking about plans for my limited future. “What are you going to do,” after all, would probably be the first question out my mother’s mouth. I’d be prepared to spend a long time with my family, and I’d also plan something for after the initial discussion. You’ll all want to get out of the room after a certain amount of time, and going somewhere helps to enable a mood change. It won’t make them spontaneously come to terms with the situation, of course, but it might break through some of the initial shock and depression.

You have a particularly difficult situation, since you’re just now nearing the end of what they probably saw as the preparation period for the rest of your life. That’s going to add extra pain. I see that you have just mentioned that you are far away from your family. Maybe doing this on the phone is fine for you. But if you’d prefer to do it in person, I think you might want to consider how important this is and the possibility that it’s worth a trip.

Hello and welcome to fluther. I hope you get better and know of no further challenges and sorrow. I, personally, wouldn’t tell them unless I thought there was a good chance to live and/or needed help. Otherwise, I just wouldn’t. That’s just me.

I would probably tell one person and then ask them to tell the rest. I don’t know how I would handle telling a gathering of people or telling people one after another.

What tragic news. You are in my thoughts.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone…

Has your neurologist referred you to a counselor who specialises in these issues who could help you share the news? It seems a lot to have to deal with by yourself and I would hope that you wouldn’t have to.

I wish you peace.

I think I tend to agree with @seazen on this. I would put off telling my family (other than a wife, of course, if I were living with her) until it became “necessary”. That is, until I were incapacitated or nearly so, and the end was plainly in sight and absolutely inevitable.

I’d do that for two reasons:

1) I wouldn’t want them burdened with the knowledge that my own clock is ticking and will (probably) run out before theirs does, and

2) I just wouldn’t want the sympathy and solicitude that would inevitably come. That, and all of the well-meaning but time-wasting quack ‘cures’ and sure-fire tips that you’ll get.

I’ve often tried to mock up how I would react to news such as you’ve been given. I think (because it’s the way I always think) that there has to be a good joke in it somewhere, and I’d be looking for that before I did the rest of the “seven stages” or whatever.

I wish you the best in whatever you do and however you decide to handle this. I hope you’ll stay with us.

Doing a residency can be quite draining, and that is especially bad for you. Can you move back home without saying too much about why?
You are in my prayers. Good luck!

Dear MD – I’m sincerely sorry to hear about your diagnosis.
My uncle recently passed away from inoperable brain tumor and while it was sad to see him go at such a young age, our entire family remarked at how painless his passing was (for him).

That said, after seeing my uncle attempt to compensate (for a time) and then require care from our entire extended family…you will undoubtedly require care and you will undoubtedly want to be closer to your family, right?

As already mentioned by @filmfann – a residency rotation (esp. year 1) is highly physically and mentally challenging. Your ability to care for others is already being tested and diminished by a demanding schedule that almost always involves a great lack of sleep. I cannot imagine that your program would WANT for you to continue at the risk of your own health and the potential well-being of any patients you encounter in residency.

My uncle was only able to “compensate” for some time before he began to act differently enough that his co-workers noticed. He was a car enthusiast and auto-body expert. Before his diagnosis he once got lost and confused when his car got a flat. When he showed up late to work his coworkers new something was not right when he had had trouble changing a flat tire.

I can only answer what I what do in your shoes – and I am a very pragmatic “just the facts” kind of person, as is most of my family.
You’ll need to gauge if your family is this way, too—or if they’ll be relying on your expertise for guidance. Most of all, I would recommend to you that you be very upfront – but be willing to go at their pace.
The initial news may be so upsetting they cannot progress to talk about your wishes.

Again, I urge you to consider whether you can leave your residency and travel home in person. You will want to get recommendations on good physicians in your home area..you will want to put your wishes for what will be out there clearly so your loved ones won’t be left wondering.

Lastly, to all other jellies.. we can only take MD at his word that s/he is being honest about this diagnosis.. however I find it VERRRY surprising to hear one part of his/her story:
“I’ve told families about bad prognosis, told them that their family member didn’t make it, etc but I can’t imagine how I should go about doing this.”

MD, I come from a long line of doctors and have worked in medical settings for a lonnng time. I have NEVER EVER heard of a resident, especially a 1st year resident being told to deliver news of this sort to family members.

Hospitals I have worked with in the past have a social work team and chose the lead physician (most experienced, most senior health care team lead) deliver this information to families.

So, with all due respect @mdintraining – if you truly have a diagnosis – why have you not mentioned glioma or specific site of occurrence? And, perhaps your program is truly just different than one any of my friends, family or colleagues attended..but I would really like to hear from other MDs (they lurk around here) on whether they ever, as a 1st year Resident, were permitted to deliver bad news on patient prognosis during their ER or surgical rounds.
Just sounds sketchy to me..but I stand ready to be corrected.

A little off topic, so I won’t go into details but to answer some of your questions…

@geeky_mama, residency programs as you mentioned do consist of teams with social workers, physicians at different levels of training, and case managers (to name part of the team)... but at 3 am there is usually just an intern (1st year in training) and a junior or senior resident that is taking care of the patients (other physicians are available but usually have different specified roles)... so unfortunately, there is not always an attending physician in house to deliver the bad news… in a controlled setting like a clinic follow up, then of course that opportunity is available, but a patient who crashes overnight, an intern and resident are the ones staffing the intensive care units… critical care fellows are not in house at all hospitals… many many many residents, including interns, give bad news- very common practive

also, im puerto rican… so as a native spanish speaker, training in NY, i personally do deliver the “bad news” frequently

lastly, wether the tumor is glioblastoma multiforme or a poorly differentiated astrocytoma or a high grade glioma or any other type of tumor, that really was not my point…

i appreciate the first half of your response… should you have any other comments to address the legitimacy of my post, please dont hesitate to ask…

and since you asked for a specific site of occurrence, left frontal lobe GBM, .3cm midline shift due to surrounding edema…

again, not the point of my post but ill share more to encourage helpful responses…

@geeky_mama Wow, that was truly rude of you. @mdintraining did not need to get into his diagnosis, his question was how to deliver news.

In defense of @geeky_mama not that she needs any, or would want my defense in any case we have seen trolls in Fluther from time to time posting outright lies to get attention. I try to answer straight up as if the poster is who he or she says, but it wouldn’t be the first time we answered honestly, only to find later that we’d been duped.

Yep. I stand corrected.
And I only asked for more detail (and I didn’t mean to be rude)—because I have seen people online misrepresent things in some twisted form of attention seeking.
Thanks for the clarification @mdintraining and again, I didn’t mean to be rude—just skeptical.

@geeky_mama no worries… i never have considered skepticism as cynicism… thanks

@mdintraining: If I were your parent or sibling, I would want to know everything as soon as possible. You may have only <5 years left or you may get lucky and have more. That is irrelevant. Families are there for the good times and the grim ones.

You may want to not use the term “brain cancer” but the specific name of the tumor. Two members of my family had brain tumors (meningioma and acustical neuroma).They were benign but having the family around to love and support the patients was important to us all.

MY brother died from non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma; we celebrated his life in good health and shared in his long farewell. None of us would have had it otherwise.

My father thought he would spare his adult children from the knowledge of his Parkinson’s. When he finally, reluctantly, told us, my initial reaction was fury.

Do they know you’ve been having headaches? Perhaps if you tell them that you’ve been having terrible headaches and went to see a neurologist… as a parent, that would be all my daughters would have to get out, and I would know.

Perhaps write out an e-mail with all of the details, and hit the send button as soon as you need to, in case talking to them gets difficult, and so they can refer back to it for details.

I’m sorry.

I can’t really advise you, but I can tell you about my experience. A very good friend, also a physician (although probably a couple of decades older than you), passed away of brain cancer some three or four months ago. He never told anyone of his friends—at least, not overtly—until he realized that none of the treatments would help. This was probably about three or four months before the end.

The last time I saw him (he couldn’t or wouldn’t see us when we came to visit in the last few months), was maybe a year ago. We had dinner together. We knew he was sick, and his wife had been telling us he didn’t want to tell anyone, but he talked about it a bit. He told us where the radiation treatment had been pointing, and he mentioned some of his symptoms and so, I figured it was most likely brain cancer, but I wasn’t sure.

It was very weird. Knowing but not knowing. Why didn’t he want to tell? I guess he believed he was going to beat it, and he didn’t want his fellow MD’s to know since he thought it would be bad for his practice and also bad for his credibility. I mean, what patient would want a doctor whose brain had unknown damage?

Well, you know the story. You’re probably a scientist who knows that these estimates of life expectancy can be wildly off. Each patient is a unique individual with unpredictable responses to the disease and the treatments. What do you tell people? How will they feel? How will it affect them? How will it affect them if you don’t tell, and then close to the end, you surprise them?

If I had known, would I have behaved differently? I think so. I wouldn’t have waited so long. I guess we thought we were respecting his privacy, and we didn’t know how bad it really was. We didn’t know that the results of the final surgery were negligible. We didn’t know because he didn’t want anybody to know, and we were pretty close to them. We were the only couple they went out with regularly.

I wanted to say good bye and I tried to say good bye, and I think we were close enough that we could reasonably expect to be given the chance to say good bye. We were able to support his wife, and we continue to do so. Maybe that was our job at the end.

She just sent us some photos that had been taken…. not that long ago. He looked gaunt already, but he never had all that much flesh on him, anyway. But he was smiling broadly, and looked happy, and it just was hard for me to look at those pictures. Reminding me of my feelings about him never being around again.

He was very interested in alternative medicines and authored a study on the effectiveness of red rice on reducing cholesterol (apparently, it works pretty well). So it was one of life’s ironies that he worked so hard on eating right—using all that science has thus far figured out. He lived one of the more healthy lives that an American can live and it really didn’t matter. Brain cancer got him anyway.

I don’t know if this helps, because it’s just a story about my experience of being a friend of someone who had the cancer, and you’re talking about telling your family. I would have wanted to know. I was kind of annoyed at him for not talking about it. Maybe we could have been more help to him. But I respected his desire to keep it secret.

They said he had a good death. He was very beatific for those who did see him. He practiced meditation with a master whose specialty is helping people through the last time of their lives. When his wife started to freak, he would tell her in a whisper (he couldn’t talk much by then), “Meditate! Now.” As if she was the one who was dying, not him.

Yet,after he was gone, she told us that between his moments of seeing the other side and being calm and comforting to others, he did have his moments of terror.

I support you in your desire to tell your family. If it were someone else who had the cancer and you were giving the news to the family, how would you do it?

I will tell you that the first thing I want to know when I find out (and I’ve had far too many friends tell me this in the past few years), is how long. People are reluctant to talk about this as if it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe we don’t ask because we don’t want the person to think about it.

People often don’t know how to talk about it or what to talk about. I’m not sure if others want to,, but I know I always wanted to. A person is in a very weird time of life—having a death sentence of some unknown but shorter than usual length. How do you want it to be? Do you want to not talk about it because that would be dwelling on it? Do you not want to talk about it because people freak out? What?

I wish my friend had told me and I wish he would have let me know what he wanted. How did he want this last dance with life to go? Did he want to talk about what might be coming? Did he want just to talk about life? Was he willing to acknowledge what was happening, or did he want to ignore it?

We knew something was up because he couldn’t join us as much. He never had energy any more. It would have been a shock, but it wouldn’t have been a surprise.

I don’t think it really matters how you tell people. I think it matters what you think about it and how you want it to go. You might change your mind about that, but still, insofar as you know, express your ideas. I have to wonder if that is really what you are thinking about. What kind of relationship do you want to have from now on? Figure that out. Ask us to ask questions to help you think it through. Once you know how you want it to be, I think you won’t be troubled about how to tell them.

If it were me at a younger age as yourself, and I wasn’t married, I would go home and tell them in person. I also wouldn’t continue my studies until I knew my chances have improved. This is a time you need to take care of yourself. As a physician you know how much stress lowers your immune system.
I would go home and tell them because I am thinking from a moms perspective. I would not want my son or daughter to call me and tell me while they are miles away such devastating news. The thought of them suffering alone would just add to my pain. Your siblings will also probably have the same reaction. No one expects such bad news from someone so young.
By the way there is no right way or easy way to tell anyone something so devastating. However I would ease into it with explaining symptoms that lead you to doctors and then what the diagnosis was. If you simply say I have brain cancer than they may think you are kidding at first and this may make them feel even worse.
I don’t know if your religious or not but I’ll keep you in my prayers.
If that makes you uncomfortable than I wish you the best. Either way I hope you get through this tough time with the strength an grace you need.

Dear MD

Firstly, I hope your treatment goes well and in time the news you will be giving your family will be good news. I haven’t ever had to tell my family something like this but I have been on the receiving end of not being told. I live in Australia, my family were all in the UK except one sister, my father had a heart attack and I wasn’t informed. I found out because a few days after it was my birthday and my dad didn’t ring me. I was told when I called to see what was happening. I was told he was going to be fine (that was the advice they were being given) but he died five days later and I didn’t get to see him or speak to him. I was informed of his death by my sisters then boyfriend. I was so hurt that nobody told me. It wasn’t malicious. People just didn’t want to bother me unless they had to and when he died I think they thought my sister would speak to me personally. She didn’t. But it was my dad. I had a right to be worried and concerned and it made me very angry that other people decided what was right for me and I should have received the news of his death from a family member.

They are your family. As hard as it may be to tell them, you have to. They love you and they will want to support you through whatever is going to come in the future. If you can’t speak to them in person, pick up the phone and call each and every one of them. Don’t leave it to another person to pass the info on. The last thing you want for them now is wondering, why they didn’t hear it from you. I wouldn’t try to get them all in one place because I know I would be coming up with all sorts of terrible things that it could be or great things it could be. Don’t be dramatic. Just tell them. There isn’t going to be a pretty way. Just be honest. Tell them what is happening, what you know and how you feel and what you need from them even if that is nothing at the moment.

Best wishes for the future.

If there is any way possible, please tell them in person. My grandmother called a family dinner (which wasn’t all that unusual), and afterward gently told us that she’d been diagnosed with cancer. There was a lot of crying, but hand holding and hugging, too. It was a scary but loving time. I wish you all the best.

All the answers above are very helpful, there isn’t really a good way to break the news to them.
You should not hide any facts to protect them, share with them everything you know about your desease and express to them your feelings about it, and give them the chance to support you and stand by your side, and make you feel better in everyway that they can, that it all they need from you, a chance to show you thier love and they will resent it if you deny them that right.

Wish you the best @mdintraining

I’m so sorry to hear of your situation.

There are only a few pertinent pieces of advice I would like to share with you.

Don’t tell anybody anything at all for at least a week or however long you need to begin to process this enormous life altering news.

You could most likely benefit most from some input from others who are facing something similar. If you’re in NY there must be ample support groups available for people also dealing with cancer.

It might help to get feedback from a variety of people as to how they handled telling their loved ones. This gives you time to figure out what is best for you and your family and close friends.

The most immediate decision facing you is what to do regarding your intern/residency program.

Perhaps a counselor/Psychologist with experience with newly diagnosed cancer patients could be very helpful in helping you to sort out the complexities here.

Yes, you are going to have to tell your family as straightforwardly as possible but you don’t have to do it tomorrow or do it by phone.

Unless the Neurologist has warned you that you could suddenly drop dead at any moment, with a prognosis of possible years left rather than weeks you do have time to get your head around this first, and then to make the decisions necessary for your medical studies and career and create the best type of situation for both yourself and family for when you do finally share this information with them.

So take the time to catch your breath, get advice from others walking in your shoes as well as trained professionals and then deal with the logistics of telling your family. Give yourself a breather.

Obviously I’m not suggesting you delay this for years or something, but give yourself time to recover from the shock of this devastating news.

That’s just my take on it but I have not been in your shoes so I can’t pretend to know how you are feeling. All I can do is try to imagine what I might do.

And I know I would need a little time to process my own thoughts first before involving my family. But that’s just me.

There’s just one little other hopefully helpful suggestion I’d give you.

I don’t know if you are familiar with the name Randy Pausch. He was a professor at Carnegie-Mellon and he gave a talk (later also published in a book) entitled “The Last Lecture”.

He describes his dealing with Pancreatic Cancer in a remarkably straightforward way with both humor hope and tremendous fearless honesty.

When you feel up to it, seek it out on the web.

There is also an in-depth interview (perhaps two) with ABC and Diane Sawyer and can be found on either their website or YouTube.

I think you may find it interesting, to say the least.

I’m so sorry to hear of your diagnosis, and I wish you all the best in treatment.

I have to agree with those who’ve suggested that you tell your closest family in person. Yes, you’re far away, and getting home might be difficult, but personally, I’d go anyway. It’s going to be a tough conversation, especially because parents shouldn’t have to face the possibility of outliving their children. I’m sure your parents would greatly benefit from a hug. Please go to see them; you all deserve it.

To me the answer is pretty straight forward. I would just sit them down, all in one spot if possible, and tell them. I don’t think it would be fair not to tell them. How they handle the information is up to them. My sister died of cancer recently and I know it would have been upsetting if family members had not known about it well in advance. In my own case, I didn’t have much choice. I have IPF with a prognosis of 3–4 years of life remaining. I am prescribed with oxygen 24/7 so it is obvious I have a problem and it would be silly for me to lie about what the problem might be. There is no treatment or cure for my disorder. I believe the situation will be better handled if they know what they are to handle.

thank you everyone for taking the time to respond… a lot of really helpful suggestions and i sincerely appreciate your well wishes…

i have been processing so much information these last few weeks that i havent sat down to really analyze my own thoughts on the all this… so i think im gonna start from there…

again, i wanted to thank everyone who responded… its my first time posting on here and didnt expect such fast and helpful advice…

sincerely,
chris

@mdintraining I cannot fathom how much you are having to process right now. Give yourself the benefit of having your family help you with this. You shouldn’t go through it alone.

IPF = Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis?

@jeruba, i think that is what ramblemutt was referring to… unfortunately, IPF is a progressive disease that has no definitive medical therapy… i did mention to him/her (sorry not sure) that lung transplantation is an option in some patients with IPF- certainly not a trivial option but one worth discussing with your physician should there not be other co-morbid conditions that make this an undesirable condition… prayers/well wishes/thoughts with you @ramblemutt…

Okay, so you weren’t asking for advice about “if” or “whether” you should tell, but how. (I still advise thinking carefully about “if or whether… or when”, because you won’t be able to un-ring that bell, and no matter what anyone else thinks about your duty to inform, that duty doesn’t exist. It’s your life, not anyone else’s.)

In case you’ve already decided, then I’d want to inform as many people at one time and as completely as I could. Maybe this is just me, but I would not want to be fielding a barrage of repetitive questions at a retail level, one customer at a time asking the same question. So a large family gathering would be optimal in order to do the debriefing as widely and fully as possible at one time. I think I’d also include a printed handout with more detail and literature / web references listed so that people could get some of their particular / unique questions answered without having to bother you, and also to forestall some of the questions that will be simply morbid curiosity disguised as interest. (And don’t think that there aren’t some of those in every family.) That way when a particularly intrusive question comes up, you’ll be able to refer the questioner back to what you’ve already printed or listed as a reading reference. If nothing else, it will save a lot of talk-talk… and your time. (Naturally, I wouldn’t do that in all cases. If I were you and informing my family, I’d be willing and expecting to spend a lot more time answering questions from, say, my mother, than a cousin who is merely relaying a question from her friend – though of course she’d never admit that.)

Obviously, you are thinking of your family, and that is very commendable. But you have to think of yourself first.

@mdintraining: Dear Chris; Use this community as a sounding board or journal if you need to vent. Simply mention that you are not looking for advice. We will listen.

I truly don’t know what I would do in your place, but I know that when my husband was diagnosed with lung cancer he did not want everyone to know about it, and I had to respect that. I kept it very quiet.

Since I didn’t want him to have to take care of me emotionally, I would have liked to be able to turn to friends and family, and it was hard on me not to be able to say much about it. Much later, when it came time for surgery and I had to take family medical leave from work, the subject couldn’t be avoided.

You know your own family best; an important question is whether they will be up to supporting you or they will go to pieces and need you to hold them together. If you think they’re going to be very fragile themselves, you might want to take in a larger family group at the same time so there will be plenty of support for them from the start.

If you were my son, I would want to receive the news from you in person. My first impulse would be to hug and hold you and not to return an agonized cry or a stricken silence over the phone.

If I myself had such a diagnosis now, at my age and stage of life, I would certainly tell my family and closest friends as soon as I had had a chance to gather my inner resources. My husband would know right away. If I were young and just getting started and didn’t have a husband and children, I think it would be very different.

My heart goes out to you in this terrible crisis, @mdintraining. You’re new here, but already you’re not a stranger. This is a very warm, feeling community of intelligent and thoughtful folks who do lend one another a lot of comfort. I hope we can be of some help.

@gailcalled mentioned I could use this as a sounding board… so here goes…

Over the weekend, I spoke with my dad… even knowing that I have this news to share with him and the rest of my family, I was able to sound “normal” when I spoke with him the last few weeks. I don’t know if its because I am thinking about how and when to break the news or if I just have had enough time to process everything, but it is starting to eat at me…

But in the end, I feel blessed… blessed because I am doing what I love- medicine. I know some of you mentioned that I would need to give that up and that probably will be the case but I figured that I don’t need to decide that today (just in case anyone is curious, the program director at my residency is aware of what is going on and really supportive).

So going back to my conversation with my dad… he could tell something was different. Was it my tone or my lack of meaningful conversation or maybe just that fact that he is my best friend and just knew? Well, long story short, he is flying out to NY this weekend. I did try to discourage him from doing so but hard to stop a 52 year old puertorican father from doing what he has decided to do. I guess, I will have to tell him… I never have been good at lying to my parents and even though I have lived away from home for 10 years now, I all the sudden feel like by telling my dad, everything will be better. Based on some of the advice given, it understand that some might think it selfish to burden him with this… I really want to finally have someone that I can talk to about this and as much as I did not want him to come visit, I can’t wait for his arrival…

Thanks for anyone who took the time to read… sorry for the waste of time….

@mdintraining – Hey. That self-deprecating thing? Stop it. Right now. All of us who originally answered your question and are still following it genuinely care about how things in your life are going. So don’t apologize for any “waste of time”.

I’m glad your father is coming to visit you. That just goes to show what your relationship is like – that he was able to tell that there was something wrong. That in itself should tell you that it’s important for you to fill him in on your situation. Don’t feel like it’s selfish or that you’re “burdening” him. He cares, that much is obvious. Share your feelings with him and allow him to help you to work through things.

I wish you all the best for your visit this weekend. Try not to agonize about it; just let it happen. And please, let us know how it went. Hang in there.

I’m glad that you took @gailcalled‘s advice and decided to let us know what’s been going on.

@mdintraining

It’s not at all a waste of time. It’s what we do here. Thanks for continuing to post, because we care we do that here, too.

May I suggest that unless your father is also an MD and will understand the technical details of what you’re going to tell him (or at least ‘begin to tell him’ – maybe you don’t want to share the entire prognosis) this weekend, that you gather some reference materials, website links, and a short presentation of your own on paper, because he’s going to have to break the news to others, especially your mother. And if you’ve decided to break the news anyway, it might be worthwhile to suggest that they both travel to see you now, so that you can answer all of their questions at one time.

Good luck to you.

@Seelix point taken… sincere thanks to you!

@WasCy I was actually planning on flying home soon to tell my family- which I will discuss with my dad… I don’t want him to tell them without me there…

MD, your post brought tears to my eyes. I am glad your dad is coming. I haven’t been in your situation, but I am pretty sure I would want to know there was someone to talk to honestly. You know, you are your dad’s little boy. No matter how old you get, you will always be his little boy and he loves you. So he wants to be there. As to what you tell him, how it goes… don’t plan too much. Go with your instincts. That pretty much applies to this whole situation I think. If it feels like the right thing for you to do, (continuing to work, telling your dad) go with it. You are the only person who really knows what is right for you right now. Listen to that inner voice and don’t try to do what everyone else thinks you should do or what is necessarily right for everyone else. You perhaps need to be a little selfish right now and do what you need. Good to hear from you here and as everyone has said, there is no waste of our time here. We are all glad to be your support group.

@mdintraining, if your mother can’t come along this weekend, perhaps you should be planning to fly back with your father when he goes home. Otherwise he is going to be in the position of keeping something huge from your mother. And if I know your mother, I’m sure he won’t be able to do that. So then she is going to have to keep from you the fact that she knows already. All this secrecy is going to make everything harder.

Please keep coming back to us here. We care, but we’re not your family, so we aren’t going to be emotionally devastated or paralyzed by anything you tell us. Sometimes having access to warm, interested detachment is a great blessing.

@mdintraining – I hope this weekend brings relief and support to you – being able to be with your dad and share the burden. It’s not selfish to share news this vital with your loved ones, it’s what family is made for…and at least in my family, my parents would be more upset if I didn’t share the burden with them.

It’s so good that you have the support of your program director so you can continue doing what you love. Being able to do what makes you happy must be a help to your overall mental well-being..and I agree, that’s a blessing.

Good luck with your dad. I’ll be thinking of you and sending some prayers your way.

Thank you so much for keeping us updated, MD. We’re all pulling for you!