Above is a picture of my beautiful boy, Fox, which was taken shortly after his second birthday, and 6 weeks after he was diagnosed with cancer.
One afternoon when Fox was 23 months old we noticed that a hard mass had popped up in his tummy. It hadn’t been there the previous day, so I consulted Dr Google, unconcernedly typing “hard mass in my child’s abdomen” into the search engine. The whole first page of search results were childhood cancer websites. I clicked on a few, and discovered another very odd shared symptom - an unexplained limp. It all felt too weird and too specific for me to shrug off the feeling of terror that immediately sprung up in my heart, so I booked a doctor’s appointment for the following afternoon.
I was 32 weeks pregnant at the time, and spent the next morning at the local hospital for obstetric appointments. I couldn’t shake this niggling, terrifying feeling that we were about to sail into a childhood cancer diagnosis, so (again with the Googling!) searched, “What I wish I had known before my child’s cancer diagnosis” in between my ultrasound and consult. Up came this article. A lot of my previous work has been in strategy, so, consoling myself that this was probably all nuts and hopefully I’d never have to use it, I wrote my own “What would need to happen if Fox had cancer” list.
Later that night (Christmas Eve of all days!) an ultrasound at our local Children’s Hospital revealed an enormous tumor on Fox’s liver, weighing between 10 - 15% of his body weight at the time. He was diagnosed with hepatoblastoma a few days following, which is a cancer that affects 1 in a million kids.
It’s hard to describe the ways that a childhood cancer diagnosis blows up your life, but it does. An unbelievable amount of things change instantly.
A month later we were in for another rude shock - Fox also had cancer in his lungs, which had been missed in the first scans. His treatment regime got a lot more brutal, and a lot longer, instantly.
While we’ve ultimately had one of the happier endings (Fox was declared cancer free after 8 months of intense treatment), I continue to remain conscious of how much of a difference the advice and input of other parents who had already walked this road, or who were further along in the journey than Andrew and I were, made to us… including that article I read before we were even diagnosed.
That’s the point of this website: to provide a range of resources to newly diagnosed parents of a child with cancer and their supporters, which will hopefully remove some of the friction out of navigating your new life.
It’s one of the hardest roads you will ever walk. But, if you are anything like us, you will also find yourself the recipients of incredible generosity, grace and kindness coming from near and far. You will meet some of the bravest parents and kids you could ever hope to meet. You’ll get entirely new perspectives on life, that will come to feel incredibly valuable (even if you wish you never went through this to get them).
If you’re a parent of a child with cancer, feel free to send me a message or take one of my surveys, so that you can pass on your hard learnt lessons to other parents.
Sending all the love, and my wishes for your child’s successful treatment,
Anna x