When Your Child Is Sick

A Guide to Navigating the Practical and Emotional Challenges of Caring for a Child Who Is Very Ill

By: Joanna Breyer

Narrated by: Olivia J. Fox

Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins

Publisher's summary

An invaluable reference for parents of sick or hospitalized children by an experienced psychosocial counselor.

To many parents, it is hard to imagine a more upsetting reality than one where their child is hospitalized, severely sick, or terminally ill. In When Your Child is Sick, psychosocial counselor Joanna Breyer distills decades of experience working with sick children and their families into a comprehensive guide for navigating the uncharted and frightening terrain. She provides expert advice to guide them through the hospital setting, at-home care, and long-term outcomes.

Breyer's actionable techniques and direct advice will help parents feel more in-control of a circumstance that has upended their life. She alerts parents to key personnel in the hospital, gives dialogue prompts to help parents ask for the help they need, addresses the needs of their other children at home, offers advice on how to best utilize friends and family who want to help, includes stories from other families who have been there, and teaches coping techniques to help both parents and children weather the stress of prolonged illness and even death.

When Your Child is Sick is a valuable guide to managing the myriad practical and emotional complications of an impossible situation.

Includes a resource PDF

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2018 Joanna Breyer (P)2018 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“Joanna Breyer balances profound compassion with pragmatism to provide an extraordinarily valuable guide to the management and care of sick children. By using real examples and clinical vignettes, Breyer pierces through some the most difficult barriers in medicine, and helps us navigate through complex and forbidding landscapes. Written in the spirit of Jimmie Holland, the pioneering psychiatrist who studied the minds of cancer patients, Breyer’s book focuses its attention on children with cancer and other illnesses. This book should be compulsory reading for anyone facing these terrifying conundrums and life-altering decisions.” (Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction, and The Laws of Medicine, assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University)

“When Your Child Is Sick is a wonder. Though I’ve known and admired Dr. Breyer throughout her tenure at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s, I stand in awe at how comprehensive this book is in guiding parents through maintaining confidence and alleviating fear during what can be an extremely challenging experience. Breyer is a former senior member of a team of experts that has vast experience with helping families trapped in the crisis of profound childhood illness. A great clinician, she is above all an inspired teacher who provides a treasure trove of advice for those facing the greatest fear parents have - that of losing a child.” (David G. Nathan, President Emeritus, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Physician-in-Chief Emeritus, Boston Children's Hospital, Robert A. Stranahan Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School)

“Based on her extensive experience helping children with cancer and serious illnesses and their families, Dr. Breyer has written this comprehensive, innovative, and useful book. She describes, in detail, the trajectory of serious illness in children and the stressors that they and their families face. Using examples from her own practice as well as from others’ clinical and research work, Dr. Breyer provides a wealth of practical and effective strategies to help them cope during and after treatment and when treatment fails. Not a “one-size-fits-all” approach, she emphasizes the role of individual differences, experiences, styles, personalities, and preferences. In addition, there is a listing of various resources to help parents navigate treatment and living with childhood cancer. When a child is diagnosed with a serious medical condition, parents often tell us that there is no roadmap or guidebook to tell them what to expect and how best to help their child - this is that book.” (Mary Jo Kupst, PhD, Emerita Professor of Pediatrics, Medical College of Wisconsin)