This book hits closer to home for me because my little sister has leukemia. While reading this book I recognized several emotional feelings that I've also felt throughout my journey. Although Anna is the younger sibling and I am the older one we both have similar reactions to hospital life, feelings of neglect because so much attention is spent on the sick child, and dealing with it all while trying to be a teenage girl. I completely agreed with her reaction when the family therapist. When something big happens during treatment or at the beginning, adults take over. They surround you and ask how you are or if you're okay. As a kid who's just had a huge thing like "your sister has cancer" thrown at you, you really don't care about talking with some stranger about how you are. You want to be alone. I wouldn't have wanted to talk to the gaurdian ad litem either! Anna feels taken advantage of unlike her brother Jesse who feels neglected by his parents.
Personally I feel more like Jesse in this case. I understand what it is like to feel like the world revolves around the sick child. However he and I differ on how we handled it. His feeling of anger and rage were channeled into setting fires and doing drugs. I channel mine into my music. The emotions of anger, hurt, neglect, jealousy, sadness, and regret are felt a lot as a sibling of a kid with cancer. For most you can see it in their words or actions because it truly is a difficult thing to deal with. Trying to handle every day life, for me being in high school, Girl Scouts, band, and soccer; it's a lot to handle already! But when you add a crazy family schedule because of chemo treatment or symptoms from meds that keep the entire family up all night or unexpected trips to the hospital to your life, it gets even crazier.
This is going off the book a little but I think it applies to Anna some. A lot of the support that families receive throughout this process is geared towards the child with cancer. They get attention, press, presents, and special treatment from all over the country. However, the parents and siblings are often left struggling to pick up the pieces themselves and try to keep going. There are the councilors and family therapists who come talk to you once in a while but honestly, that only helps so much. I wish that there were more support programs for parents and siblings that just focus on them. I think that if there was someone who had reached out to Anna earlier and talked to her about how she felt, that maybe she wouldn't have had to take the drastic actions she did. People are so caught up in the person who's actually sick and sending them presents and trying to comfort them that they often forget how much everyone else is affected by the situation. Don't mistake me for saying that's not important, it's amazing how much hope people's support gives someone with cancer; but that hope should extend past the sick child. Anna, Jesse, and their parents might have acted differently if someone stopped to ask how they were doing instead of how Kate was. It's important that the entire family be strong, so it can function and support each of the members in it.