National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month

If Cancer is the “C” word no one ever wants to hear uttered in their doctor’s office, it is guaranteed to be an even bigger fear when it is associated with the children in your life. With thousands of children being diagnosed each year, there will always be a need for awareness and resources for scientists to find a cure. September is National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month and every little bit counts. From visiting children’s hospitals to donating teddy bears to making socks for little patients’ feet, giving a little bit of your time is just as appreciated as giving part of your paycheck for the cause of researching childhood cancers.

With cancer being the leading cause of death in children and these types of cancers being different than the ones adults are diagnosed with, the list of questions is long and the list of answers very short. Children suffer from many different types of cancer but the types that occur more often are: acute lymphocytic leukemia, bone, brain, spinal cord, Ewing’s Sarcoma, Hodgkin’s and Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, and Neuroblastoma among others.

Someone who knows a little about giving time to children in need is Carolyn Rubenstein. This young woman, just 24, became an published author in August with a collection of 20 stories by college-age survivors of childhood cancer in a book called Perseverance: True Voices of Cancer Survivors. At the tender impressionable age of 14, instead of chasing the newest clothes at the mall, Carolyn had visited a camp for children of cancer and became dedicated to helping her peers in crisis. She then started her own charity called Carolyn’s Compassionate Children (CCC) which was a pen pal program designed to connect children with cancer to peers across the nation who wanted to give their support and have a new friend to confide in. CCC has also given out 100 college scholarships since it started raising money in the year 2000.

Perseverance will make you laugh with these kids, cry for their situation, and look to the future with them as they strive to make the newest chapters of their young lives incredible. Carolyn’s courage in calling up these young adults, gaining their trust, and acquiring their stories so she can record them for the world makes the emotional pay off even better.

For Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, you don’t have to take on the world with the same vigor as Carolyn, but you can tell your friends and family to find sponsored events in their area, start a support group, petition the government for help aiding in research, or merely make a donation in support of beating childhood cancer. CureSearch,  part of the National Childhood Cancer Foundation hosts a virtual walk uniting people across America to fight the spread of these diseases. For the entire month of September they try and get 12,500 people as a virtual sponsor of the number of children diagnosed each year in the United States while trying to raise $125,000 for cancer research.

Because we were all children once, imagine how hard it would be to receive a damaging diagnosis during prime growing years, and see how strong these children are to face their illness, most without fear. This September, stay aware of the effect childhood cancer has on everyone.