Childhood cancer hits close to home for all
Cancer doesn’t discriminate based on age. Anyone can get it — including children.
September has been declared Childhood Cancer Awareness month in Saskatchewan and on Saturday a flag was raised in honour at the Legislative Building.
“(The flag raising) means a lot, childhood cancer is so underfunded and not recognized and people don’t want to hear that kids get cancer too,” said Jenn Lyster.
When Lyster’s daughter, Tegan, was two and a half she was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
“It’s devastating, your world just stops and you enter a whole new world of cancer,” Lyster said.
The family’s life became a cycle of hospital visits and chemotherapy. After 26 months Tegan’s cancer treatment was over. She is now a healthy 8 year-old who runs and plays.
“Approximately 70 years of life is saved when a child survives in comparison to someone, an adult, who if they’re older only five or 10 years of life. And they’ve lived and it’s different when it’s a kid. They’re just starting out and that potential is taken away from them,” she said.
Lyster was joined by her family and other families of childhood cancer patients for the flag raising. This is the first time the childhood cancer awareness flag has flown in front of the legislature.
Greg Ottenbreit, rural and remote health minister, had the honour of raising the flag.
“If we look only about four decades back we had just better than 50 per cent survival rate of children with cancer. Now we’re well into the 80 per cent range,” he said.
Childhood cancer is personal to Ottenbreit. In 1998, his son Brayden was diagnosed with cancer. Two years later at the age of five Brayden lost his fight.
“Through (my family’s) cancer journey, we realized what families do go through and the advancements that there has been in cancer,” Ottenbreit said.
Ottenbreit and his family have hosted Brayden Ottenbreit Close Cuts for Cancer every year since 1998 back in their hometown of Yorkton. The fundraiser challenges people to raise money for childhood cancer research and then cut off their hair.
“We lost ours in 2000 but quite often we’re seeing a lot more success. So it’s good to show people that there is hope and there is life afterwards,” Ottenbreit said.
It was a bittersweet moment for Ottenbreit on Saturday as childhood cancer survivors gathered around him to help raise the flag.
“It’s important not only to support survivors, to make sure they know that people are thinking of them,” he said.
Ottenbreit said his reason for originally running for politics came from his experience as a parent of a cancer patient.
“Not to say that our experience was bad but it just showed me that I wanted to give back more to my province and my community,” he said.