schooling through illness

Homeschooling can absolutely be done with illness/medical challenges! One thing to remember is that you are in charge of your school calendar. Take those days off every month and decide if you simply want to extend your school year a bit into June, or do the occasional Saturday learning, or want to not worry about the calendar. Another option for the kids at home while you are handling the medical things is to have school assignments overseen by whoever is caring for them.

My background: Mom of 10 kids age 1-18, always homeschooled. The biggest medical challenges started with my 7th child, who is 7 years old now. He was born with a number of medical challenges (spina bifida, hydrocephalus, chiari 2 malformation, bilateral clubfeet) and has developed others along the way on top of the care for those (including osteoporosis). It has meant a NICU stay, spinal cord surgery a couple times, 7 brain surgeries, and many many more – we’re about to schedule surgeries number 23 and 24. Add in literally hundreds of doctor appointments, hundreds of therapy appointments, and more.

Homeschooling has worked well through it all. We have the flexibility to do learning any time of day, any day of the week. We don’t take 7 hours to get through one day of learning like the public school. It is so much more streamlined. Sometimes daddy or grandma oversee lessons/practice if I’m gone with my son. His work can go on the road with us if needed. Or we school year round and take 1 week breaks more often and a shorter summer break. Or I work with kids in the afternoon after appointments, or schedule appointments in the afternoon and finish school work by lunch.

Also – praying for your family through this challenge! Sometimes life is enough learning. My kids have learned as much by being set loose with a guideline to ‘read something from this shelf, write something, and get outside in nature’ as they have in sit down lessons in some seasons.

Hi Keri,

I’m so sorry to hear about your little one’s diagnosis but praising God for treatments that can help her, and for the flexibility of homeschooling. I agree with Tristan that homeschooling, particularly CM type learning can be done along the way. One of our daughters has a cleft lip and palate and has had over 10 surgeries and dozens of appointments since we brought her home from China when she was 5. In those early years I brought all 5 of our kids to appointments, packing bags with readers, handwriting, nature drawing, etc. Or as Tristan suggested, we’d either take that day off or it was a very light one. Doing CM was never a problem surrounding those surgeries and appointments.

For myself, however, I have had five surgeries within the last two and a half years, four of them on my spine, so any kind of homeschooling has been challenging for me to accomplish. But, when mama is the one with the illness, it’s been a little challenging for me! Tristan, I’m going to message you…your son’s surgeries sound similar to some of mine.

Marmiemama – No, Mason has Spina Bifida, some of his vertebrae did not close around the spinal cord, he was born with an opening in his back and the spinal cord and nerves in that area exposed (and nerve damage happened in utero from the exposure). He had a closure 7 hours after birth. He is paralyzed from the hips down, with some incomplete nerve damage higher than that (core). He’s also had one spinal cord detethering so far. The Chiari is related to the spina bifida. He has scoliosis so rods or spinal fusion may be in the future, as things progress. We shall see. The brain surgeries relate to the hydrocephalus, he has a shunt to drain excess fluid from the brain to his abdomen where it can be absorbed by the body. The shunt has clogged/failed 6 times and needed replaced. Lots of other surgeries on legs/tendons/muscles/hips/eyes/etc.