Melanie’s daughter Emily was just six years old when she was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia.

Two years earlier, Melanie’s husband, Colin, was diagnosed with bowel cancer and after a tumultuous 17 months of treatment, he passed away suddenly from a bout of pneumonia.

As Melanie and her girls Emily and Lucy were getting back on their feet, Melanie had noticed some unusual bruising on her and noticed Emily had lost a little bit of her enigmatic, bright, vivacious spirit, and seemed a bit flat. She never expected a cancer diagnosis.

Melanie recalls “the toughest question that I got from Emily, literally within 24 hours of diagnosis was, am I going to die just like daddy? I was able to answer very honestly, that I didn’t think she was going to die, but what we were going to embark on was going to be really hard.

“Whilst I answered my child, honestly that I didn’t think she was going to die, the fact is, in the back of my mind, I still didn’t know the answer to that. Emily became very depressed and withdrawn, due high dose steroids and started to lash out at me and because of everything that was going on, Lucy became withdrawn.

“Here’s the thing about childhood cancer. It’s not just about the child who’s affected. It’s a family illness and it affects us all in very different ways. I could see there was a great potential that this would harm Lucy and that this would affect the trajectory of her life. Lucy had completely shut down.

When Lucy initially came into the hospital room, she was very frightened. She was very frightened by the equipment that Emily was attached to. She was frightened by the fact that Emily was now incredibly withdrawn. And that Emily wasn’t behaving the way that she had been prior to admission to hospital. So Lucy didn’t say anything at all.

“They love dressing up and they love acting things out. I remember at one stage being absolutely mortified that the girls had set up a graveyard in our playroom for their Barbies. And that they had written a memorial for each of the Barbies,” Melanie recalled.

“I went to my social worker in the depths of despair worried that my girls were entertaining the idea of dying. I was reassured that was not unusual for children.

“They go to the experiences in which they feel safe, that they express things in nonverbal ways because they simply don’t have the language. I was able to then go back and have a discussion with the girls about the purpose of the graveyard and what they were thinking about death.

“They were just working out how each Barbie would be looked after in the grave and it was, it was a lot simpler than I actually thought.”

Emily and Lucy are now thriving at school and Emily’s treatment ended in December 2023.  

Kids Cancer Conversations hosted by Georgie Gardner is a podcast made in collaboration with RedKite, the podcast seeks to explore the hidden side of Childhood Cancer, the non-medical part that often gets missed on the cancer journey.

Episode three of Kids Cancer Conversations with Georgie Gardner is available now.

Original article written for 9Honey

Kids Cancer Conversations hosted by Georgie Gardner is a podcast made in collaboration with RedKite, the podcast seeks to explore the hidden side of Childhood Cancer, the non-medical part that often gets missed on the cancer journey.