this is what childhood cancer looks like September is Childhood Cancer Awareness month. Social media feeds will be flooded with facts and figures about why it’s so important to raise awareness, help families, and fund research for kids with cancer. We need to raise awareness about how many children are impacted by this disease, what the survival rates look like, and how treatment impacts children in the short and long term. But my post today is intended to raise awareness for what this disease does to families. How it impacts the children and parents who are beside these young patients every step of the way. I spend so much time researching childhood cancer, and in doing so I come across a lot of families. Far too many. Below I've paraphrased a small collection of situations we find ourselves in, and thoughts that haunt us as cancer parents. No one wants to imagine him or herself in our shoes, obviously. But please, take the time to read these sentiments. Allow yourself to feel the

Sonny and Ty in 2011 This summer, after Lou’s mother suffered a serious heart attack, my father-in-law was able to embrace her after she was extubated and lucid again. “We did good, right?” I heard her say through her loving tears, foreheads pressed together. “Yeah. We did good. The kids are good. We did good.” At the end of this crazy, beautiful, life, a mother just wants to know that she did good. A father wants to know that his kids are okay. Facing their own inevitable sunset, it’s all they cared to validate. That they were good parents. The kids are alright. The last conversation I had with my father-in-law, Sonny, was about Ty. We were in the hospital visiting mom, and he was so upset watching her sleep in the hospital bed, knowing how uncomfortable she was. I hadn’t seen him cry like that since we lost Ty. It makes sense, of course, as we sat there reflecting on all that Ty went through, and what mom was going through in that moment. Sonny said that he couldn’t stop thinking abo