Kids & this thing called Cancer

Chubby cheeks from steroids

During our journey so far I’ve heard and seen a lot of information and facts and met a lot of children & families. So I’ve been thinking for a while that I wanted to put some of this down in writing. I’m sorry if it seems depressing or very sad, it’s a hard subject to write about without it being that because at the end of the day we are talking about a life threatening and in some cases terminal illness. But I will try to lift this feeling as much as I can with what I share. I am going to share some more facts in a seperate entry for those who may be interested.

I am going to focus on children so please forgive me, if you, as an adult are fighting or have fought cancer, or a loved one is, or you have lost a loved one to it. Every life is valuable and precious to God, and loved ones. I lost my own Dad, 6 months before Charlotte’s diagnosis and a month after finding out he was terminally ill, after he had a small brush with it 14 months previous. I frequently read blog entries, bio’s, tweets or Facebook comments of adults and many times am in tears as I feel for the pain & suffering this terrible disease causes.



Hospital visits for chemo, still smiling

Cancer is a terrible disease for everyone, but it is about children that I want to write as this is my biggest experience of it, and many are too young to tell their own story or share their own feelings of it. For me it just seems worse to see children battling with it, being poorly, suffering from treatment and sadly some losing their battle…all at a time when they should just been concerned with enjoying life, learning, developing and laughing…after all you only get one childhood. Don’t get me wrong children are amazingly resilient and they keep on doing all or most of those things when they can, and with a smile on their face, but also a large chunk of their time is taken up with hospital, drugs, procedures, surgery, chemo, radiotherapy and the list goes on. It can have a massive impact on their confidence at different ages for different reasons. At the end of the day no matter how brave we are, how we keep going for their sake, or keep positive…it is awful to see your child and other children going through it. You can watch a clip on the local news or a documentary about it, and you think it’s bad, but until you’re actually in that world yourself you don’t realise the full impact of cancer on a child.


In the pushchair as legs weak from steroids & dealing with hair loss

What has struck me about cancer over the last nine months during our hospital visits and stays, is that Cancer, knows no bounds, it has no regard for age, colour, race, sex, health, family situation or history…and the list could go on and on. I wanted to share some of the situations I’ve come across where my heart has gone out to a family even more because of particular circumstances.

When Charlotte was first diagnosed we shared a room for a week with a little 2 ½ year old boy and his Dad. They are a Somalian family who had just welcomed the arrival of a new baby girl, when two weeks later their son was diagnosed with the same Leukaemia as Charlotte, but was fighting for his life in Intensive Care as his enlarged lymph nodes had restricted his airways, and there was concern he’d been starved of oxygen. To make matters worse, his Mum didn’t understand or speak English and while she looked after their newborn daughter, Dad had stay with him and care for him, something in his culture he was not used to at all. Although he spoke reasonable English, I observed at times the difficulties the staff had in impressing upon Dad the importance of all the aspects involved with a child on treatment. It also turned out their son has undiagnosed neurological problems, as he had just been at home with his Mum, but because of his cancer these came to light sooner than they would have and are now being addressed. If the family had still been in Somalia the father told me, his son would be dead now. They knew nothing of Leukaemia and in poor conditions his son probably would have died as a result of the particular complications he had.

Poorly in hospital with infection

I’ve met babies who within days or weeks have been found to have brain and liver tumours, I can’t imagine the joy of having a baby to find out so soon that they had such a devastating and even fatal type of cancer. You’d think it can’t be possible for a newborn baby to develop cancer?? I’ve met and heard of children born with neurological conditions or disabilities whose life already poses so many challenges for both them and their parents and then they are struck down with cancer, and you think, how can that be fair? A child with a tumour wrapped round her Aorta near her heart….the list goes on and on, and I’m sure that anyone reading this will probably know or know of a child who for one reason or another has a heart-rending story to tell.

So for me, having seen or heard of these children, goes to prove that nearly always (but not always) there is some worse off than yourself. Compared to these children I almost forget Charlotte has Cancer, I feel like she has this bad illness, she has to have this horrible treatment for just over 2 years, then she’ll be fine. I feel we’re lucky, and yet, during those first few days as I first got to know parents on the children’s oncology ward they had sympathy for me as a single parent and felt lucky that their treatment was for 6 months and not 26 months as Charlotte’s is, so it just goes to show that people see everyone else’s situation in a different way. It makes me think that it’s almost as if we have this inbuilt mechanism of recognising others situation as being worse in some aspects, maybe it’s a way of making us see positives, I don’t know.   

One of Charlotte's weekly blood tests

When you’re first told your child has cancer your first thought is, I can’t lose them, and it’s hard to describe the physical feeling that accompanies that thought. Then you have to start taking in the facts, the prognosis, the treatment, then with the Dr’s guidance you focus on the positives. After just the first few days, despite being devastated that Charlotte had Leukaemia I found myself feeling so relieved that if she had to have cancer she had the most common with the highest cure rates, I felt lucky, I thanked God. But, at the same time it was very scary to think that it could just as well have been Charlotte who had one of the other cancers like some of the children had that we met.  

I'm not writing this with the intention of depressing you, cause upset or to gain any sympathy. I'm writing as I want to raise awareness. Childhood Cancer is RARE, around 1,500 new cases are diagnosed every year in the UK. This means that around one child in 500 will develop some form of cancer by the age of 14 years. But there is hope for many - more than seven in 10 children diagnosed with cancer can now be cured. But, because its rare its not always the priority when it comes to research or drugs companies, some are very poorly funded.  For example prostate cancer is one of the most common cancers in the UK. Each year around 37,000 men are diagnosed with the disease, and it claims more than 10,000 lives – making it one of Cancer Research's top priorities. With those numbers you can understand why, and that sheds some light on the difficulties in funding & getting new treatments in the UK for some of the most fatal childhood cancers such as brain tumours & Neuroblastoma and families are raising £100,000 or £500,000 to give their child hope with treatment in the USA. More needs to be done for our children!  

Still smiling!!