The coping experience of parents of a child with retinoblastoma-malignant eye cancer.

The authors explored 12 couples' coping with their children's diagnosis and treatment of retinoblastoma using a semistructured interview, with qualitative, descriptive, narrative-interpretative analysis. Findings showed that the parents' experienced increased distress with the physician's first suspicion that something was seriously wrong. Distress was ameliorated when they arrived at a specialty treatment center but increased as they tackled treatment decisions. Distress decreased again after they consented to enucleation but increased after hospital discharge. The parents' strength, their ability together and individually, to separate and split between cognition and emotion contributed to coping. Parents need support from a multidisciplinary staff and parents who coped with retinoblastoma.