To Cancer Doc, FL -- As a parent of a child diagnosed with cancer, I take great offense to your comments, especially "Time to wake up and smell reality" to a mother in a similar situation to mine. Parents of children with cancer have no choice but face day after sad day, coping with caring for their loved ones. You are either clearly burnt out by your job, have lost any semblance of a bedside manner, or truly lost your humanity. I feel bad for your patients.

To Doris from CT. You need to understand something that possibly you have never had to deal with. I have spent the last 20 years of my life dealing with cancer patients including many children. The worst part of dealing with a child who has cancer is their parents. No parent wishes to loose a child. Yes, in the rare occasion, the child becomes wary of their treatments or the parents can no longer take the stress associated with watching their child waste away slowly. But that is an extememly small percentage of the parents that I and my cohorts deal with on a daily basis. The only alternative to the treatments that are currently available for treating childhood cancers is death. And yes, there are some long term complications associated with the treatment of cancer. It just is logical to understand that the more time you have to develope a complication if you survive, the greater the risk one will appear. You obviously are one of the type that thinks that just because this is the 21st century that we should have finally come up with ways to prevent all children from illness and death. Guess what, we are not that intelligent quite yet and we have a long way to go. Time to wake up and smell reality. Yes, even today children die. Even when we do everthing right. And until we get a whole lot smarter, we have to deal with the consequences of the treatments we have available.

The problems childhood cancer survivors encounter are Directly Linked to their prescribed treatments, specifically high doses of radiation and/or chemotherapy treatments that destroy the child's cancer cells, along with their immune system. OBVIOUSLY, combination therapy increases lifetime risk for any child. Three years ago, when my husband and I were deciding what treatments would benefit our 15-year-old, we had teams of oncologists (including radiologists)warn us that radiation treatment would most likely get rid of potential scattered cancer cells in the margins, but, MOST LIKELY, he would wind up trading one cancer for another.In other words, they could get rid of all potential soft tissue cancer cells, but radiation treatment was almost certain to cause leukemia or another tumor a few years down the road.
I get very angry when I hear stories of parents who are sent to court as a result of hospitals forcing them to submit their child to combination therapies that are known to cause life-threatening Late effects. What is suprising about this study is that these esteemed doctors were surpised by their findings, when anyone with even basic medical knowledge about radiation & chemo understand how destructive these therapies can be at the genetic level.

With all due respect to the survivors, the problems they encounter as they grow older are the result of their survivorship. Meaning that in years past, most would simply not have survived past their initial illnesses.

When it was pointed out to my father that more people are getting cancer these days, he pointed out that in an earlier time, they would have died of the measles and never gotten to the cancer stage.

Not to minimize the problems the cancer survivors encounter; however, I sure wish my mother, who died of breast cancer was here to have these problems.