Message from your friendly neighborhood childhood cancer survivor!
Childhood cancer survivors are such a new group due to recent medical advancements that we are still learning just about everything when it comes to long-term effects of chemo and radiation on developing brains.
One example: doxorubicin is a medicine that many going through chemotherapy take, and it’s been nicknamed “the red devil”. Fun! Why is it called that? The medicine is red and the higher dosage you take and the younger you were when you took it, the more likely you are to develop serious heart problems as you grow up. I had a small dosage and have been told my heart is fine, but I’m still advised to get heart scans done every year so we can keep an eye on things.
I’m now almost 20 years old, was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia when I was 4, caught the cancer early on, had a relatively short chemotherapy treatment, and have never relapsed, but I’m in such a rare and new group of people, there might be health effects later on in life that we don’t even know about :) We truly know so little that childhood cancer survivors, no matter how long they’ve been in remission, can often view relapse as not a question of “if” but “when”. And even if we’re not worried about relapse, there’s a lot of hypothetical, unknown long-term health effects to think about and worry about.
If you have any questions, lmk! Send a message and I’ll answer what I can. We’re so new and shiny that not many people know really anything about this experience and I’d love to share if people want to know
