Death anxiety in the outpatient leukemic child.

Awareness of the seriousness of their illness seems to persist with fatally ill children, even when they are not in the hospital. As did the fatally ill hospitalized children in previous studies so, too, the fatally ill outpatient children in the present study related significantly more stories that contained elements of preoccupation with threat to their body integrity and functioning than did the control group of children with non-fatal chronic illnesses. Not only did they express a greater general anxiety and greater anxiety in relating the stories, but, in contrast to their chronically ill counterparts, the leukemic children exhibited a lack of adaptability to the necessity of clinic visits, becoming increasingly more anxious about the clinic both as visits became more frequent and as their illness became of longer duration. The children continue to dwell on their illness, even when treated as outpatients.