What are you supposed to do when a child of only eight comes to you with cancer? This is the question I had to to answer today. I had the pleasure of being Sia's nurse today. Sia is eight years old and has Burkitt's Lymphoma, an agressive form of cancer that invades the face or jaw with grotesque tumors. Little Sia has been with us for about a week and when she arrived she had a very large tumor that was bulging from her left eye socket. We started a dose of chemotherapy soon after her arrival and now the tumor is small, small! Which is very exciting. For the past week Sia hasn't been feeling very well. Oh course I don't blame her, who wants to be on chemo? Today as she was sitting on her bed looking around I realized that she needed to do fun kid activities, she had to be bored out of her mind. So I searched the whole "fun cart" and found some glitter glue, construction paper and coloring pages. She would tell me where to put the glue and then she would decorate the paper will little bits of the colorful construction paper. About an hour later there magically appeared a pack of crayons on her bed. I don't know who gave them to her but tenki boku! Then we broke out the bubbles ... all in all we had lots of fun and it was so good to see her smiling and laughing again!
Please keep little Sia in your prayers, you see the ship is leaving very, very soon. Yes the chemo will knock this tumor down to size, but without further treatment and management in the future it is very likely it will come back, fast and ugly. Tomorrow she goes to surgery to have the left eye and remainder of the tumor removed.
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