What Does “Rare” Really Mean??? September 19, 2012

You have heard that Childhood Cancer is rare.

But, is it really????    NO…………..

Have you ever taken your child into an oncology clinic and had to wait 3 or more hours to be seen because there were so many patients ahead of your child?

Have you ever had to wait hours for your baby’s chemo to come up from the pharmacy because the pharmacist had so many other kids chemo orders to fill?

Have you ever had to wait 12 hours in the day hospital with your child feverish and crying in pain before your child could be admitted to the oncology floor because there were no empty beds??

Childhood Cancer is NOT rare, the reason you see very few children with cancer out in the general public is because they are either at a clinic or hospital receiving toxic chemotherapy treatments to try and save their lives, they are inpatient in a hospital fighting to recover from the devastating effects of those chemos and surgeries, or they must remain indoors to avoid contact with germs due to their immunosuppressed state caused by these treatments. Others may be in remission (or no evidence of disease which is the term used for the more aggressive cancers which have a high likelihood of recurring) or may be receiving an experimental treatment and may not look like they have cancer. You may have walked by a child with cancer today and not even known it.

The first set of pictures below show my baby Salvatore, during a time where he was undergoing an intensely painful treatment called 3f8 at Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in NYC. The treatment itself was torturous, but would you think there was anything wrong with him if you saw him in the street??   The second set of pictures are just a few short weeks after the first, when he was found to have relapsed and had to start high dose chemotherapy…..again.

Raise Awareness! 
Let people know Childhood Cancer is NOT rare, it is painful, often times fatal, and it can happen to ANY child at ANY time.

September is National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month!

Please help raise Awareness any way you can!

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