Each year on P.E.I., roughly five children are diagnosed with cancer.
While the handful of cases may seem relatively small, ranging in recent years from a low of three in 2007 to a high of six in 2006, each diagnosis is devastating.
“Mostly what happens is a parent knows that their child is really sick, but sometimes the kids are not that sick and (the cancer diagnosis) is a huge shock,’’ said local pediatrician Dr. Kathryn Bigsby.
“People tell us all about the emotions that they experience: the denial and the grief.’’
The uplifting news, released Wednesday by the Canadian Cancer Society, is that more Canadian children with cancer are surviving.
For all childhood cancers combined, the five-year survival is estimated to be 82 per cent — an increase of 11 per cent over 15 years.
“The improvement in cures are very heartening,’’ said Bigsby.
“The disappointment is we don’t know why kids get cancer in the way that we can do things that we know will stop kids from getting cancer.’’
Bigsby said Island children with cancer receive the same high level of treatment as children anywhere else in the country.
When a child from P.E.I. is suspected of having cancer, she said, the child is quickly seen by the pediatric oncology specialists in Halifax.
“Most children are offered the opportunity to be on a clinical trial and if there is no clinical trial or the family for whatever reason doesn’t feel the clinical trial doesn’t really suit their situation, they are offered the best treatment that is currently available,’’ she said.
She said the P.E.I. government has provided good ongoing support to the Atlantic Provinces Pediatric Hematology Oncology Network and she urges the province to continue to do so.
Margaret Arsenault of Summerside remains grateful for her daughter, Nathalie, surviving kidney cancer after being diagnosed at just age two. Margaret also beat breast cancer through surgery that followed early detection of the disease through a mammogram.
Arsenault said her own diagnosis did not have the same sharp sting as news years early that her baby had cancer.
“That wasn’t nearly as bad because we had been through the anger and through the frustration and through the hell,’’ she said.
“It was terrible. It was probably the worse thing that anybody can tell a parent, that your child has the ‘C’ word.’’
Arsenault offered her personal stories of cancer to the media Wednesday at the release in Charlottetown of the Canadian Cancer Statistics 2008 report.
She also makes hats for women with cancer who have lost their hair through treatment and she co-ordinates a visit program for women who have had a mastectomy.
“My involvement with the Cancer Society under different programs is my way of saying ‘Praise the Lord, I can do that’,” she said.