In April 2008 my 27-month-old daughter was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma, or DIPG for short. With the best treatment available, she was expected to live nine to twelve months. As her parents, this was not something on our radar screen of concerns. As an educated person, I had little awareness of the world of childhood cancer at the time. Of course I knew that kids were diagnosed with cancer. My friend Marc Joseph died of a brain tumor when we were in middle school. I can still picture his funeral. And then there are the television commercials too. Commercials showing smiling bald kids who go to St. Jude and stay at the Ronald McDonald House. These kids all live happily ever after. Or so I thought. When the calendar hit April 10, 2008 and the words “your child has cancer,” were spoken, those images were quickly shattered.
Here are just a few of the facts that I learned along the way: Statistically, your child has a 1 in 285 chance of being diagnosed with cancer. Think about that for just a moment. Consider that childhood cancer remains the number one cause of death by disease in the United States of children under the age of 15. Of those children labeled “cured” 70 to 80 percent experience lifelong acute health issues. Each day of the year in the United States, over one full classroom of children is diagnosed with cancer. One out of five children diagnosed will not initially survive the diagnosis, and for the remainder of those labeled “cured” many will die in the next 5 to 20 years of life.
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