Impact of a childhood cancer diagnosis

Mickey Guisewite, Parent With A Purpose, explains the impact of a child's cancer diagnosis has on your family and life and shares advice for getting through it
Pediatric Cancer Advice | Impact Of Childhood Cancer Diagnosis
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Impact of a childhood cancer diagnosis

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The minute that our son was diagnosed with cancer everything was different. You know, cancer consumes your whole life – you’re in a race to help save your child’s life and so everything else has to be put aside. Bills pile up, laundry piles up, there is no food in the refrigerator. You know, we were in a state of crisis and this was really, really, really a time when it was important for us to have a strong support system. I can’t stress that enough. I don’t know what I would have done without my family. They live in different places in the United States and they all flew in to help and would take turns rotating and I really couldn’t have gotten through it without them. You know, just a story of how weird and hard things can get when you have a child with a critical illness – at one point, my son had no immune system left and he was in the hospital getting another course of chemotherapy treatment. My five-year-old daughter got a horrible case of the flu and became dehydrated. And had to be hospitalized in another hospital. So I had one child in one hospital and my little 5-year-old daughter, you know, our princess, in another hospital. But I couldn’t go and see her, because I couldn’t be near her, because I could possibly get a germ. If my son got a flu germ, he would have died. And so I was in a difficult position of sending my 5-year-old daughter to the hospital to face the flu. Thank God that my sister had come in and was there and sat with my daughter through the night while she was hooked up to her own IVs and got through it.

Mickey Guisewite, Parent With A Purpose, explains the impact of a child's cancer diagnosis has on your family and life and shares advice for getting through it

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Mickey Guisewite

Parent with a Purpose

Mickey Guisewite is a former advertising executive and syndicated newspaper columnist who started The Bottomless Toy Chest after her son successfully completed cancer treatment. The Bottomless Toy Chest is a nonprofit organization devoted to delivering toys, crafts and hands-on activities to hospitalized pediatric cancer patients. Mickey lives at home with her husband, son, daughter, two dogs, two cats and two turtles. When she’s not delivering toys to sick kids, she’s at home trying to find a tiny space on the couch among her two-legged and four-legged family members. 

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