September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month!  The newspapers and social media will no doubt be featuring many childhood cancer articles. You may not see one about NET though. 

I personally cannot begin to imagine what it must be like to be a parent who has a child with cancer. I would just hope my child would be placed into the care and safe custody of experienced medical teams and would be able to get access to the best treatments available. 

I don’t know that much about Childhood cancers, but I do know that over half of childhood cancers are either Acute Leukaemias or Brain Cancer, both of which are frequently in the news. It always breaks my heart when I read stories of children with cancer. 

I do know a lot about Neuroendocrine Cancer and although you can develop it at any age, it does tend to be associated with those in later life with many statistics quoting ages in the region of 40 – 60 years at time of diagnosis.  So, childhood Neuroendocrine Cancer is uncommon in NET but it’s always sad to see young people succumb.

As a father and a grandfather, I find it heartbreaking hearing about children with cancer.  One story that has stuck with me is about a (then) 8-year-old child who was actually local to me, and I found it by chance in my local newspaper, it also came up in my google alerts. An 8-year-old with Paraganglioma, a quite uncommon type of Neuroendocrine Tumour, had lost an eye due to the location of the tumour.  It was absolutely heartbreaking to read but it’s amazing how resilient children can be given the treatment she had to endure.  It was even more heartbreaking to also read that Elizabeth’s mother Charlotte, had been diagnosed with Breast Cancer in 2019, as if both didn’t have enough to contend with.  

It’s been 3 years since I published the post about Elizabeth and was so sad to hear that both Elizabeth and her mother Charlotte, had since passed away (I’m grateful to one of my Facebook followers for finding more information (thank you Jackie).  I don’t want Elizabeth’s death to be forgotten and I dedicate this post to her, and also to her mother. 

The feature post below is about Elizabeth Rooney from UK who had a Paraganglioma from age 3 and sadly passed away from the disease age 11.  I originally posted her story on my Facebook page on 3rd May 2020.  Click here to read that original Facebook post. 

You can read the feature story below.