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Right before he turned four, doctors found a tumor in Paul Yate’s kidney.
But then…. the cancer spread.
“Basically spread throughout my whole body and they had to cut me through the… down the sternum, they had to split my sternum,” says Yates, now 17.
Paul admits…he was scared.
“I mean I remember going to the hospital and you know, just praying that I would get better and things like that when I realized my sickness and my illness,” he says.
Research just published in the Journal ‘Pediatrics’ asked: how would a disease like cancer affect a child’s emotional well-being years later?
“And surprisingly the kids that were off treatment for more than a year, were reporting that they were doing even better than the control kids,” says Alcuin Johnson, M.D., a Neuro-Psychologist with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and the AFLAC Cancer Center.
Cancer survivors were asked if they were optimistic, if they were afraid of dying, if they were happy. on a 5 point scale, they scored four-point-one-five, slightly higher than kids who never had cancer.
“I value life probably more than the average person I’d say,” says Paul, “Because I’ve been through such a traumatic experience, or just a huge experience. It’s made such a huge imprint on my life.”
“You’ll remember living through that. Well yeah that has an effect on you for the rest of you life so that other things that may happen that other people might see as really bad you’ll go ‘well it’s not bad compared to what I lived through with the cancer’,” says Dr. Johnson.
Experts say, like so many things, how a child handles a serious illness depends on their parents.
Paul’s parents stayed upbeat… even after they were told he had only a 40-percent chance of survival.
“They would tell me when I was, that it was going to be o-k and we were going to get through the fight and that, so they were really supportive and positive about it… to me, at least,” says Paul. |
