-4329 miles driven for treatment
-86 days of school missed
-21 port accesses
-13 chemo treatments
-6 prescription medications
-4 surgeries
-4 ct scans
-3 different types of chemo
-2 puke buckets
Now lets talk about these numbers in terms of a healthy child. —
-Pack your healthy child in a car for a four hour car drive. Every Tuesday. For 13 weeks. In the middle of winter. Now add some nausea. Pack on a double dose of anxiety. Those were our roadtrips.
-Have your kid miss 86 days of school at the time they are just learning to read. Just learning to identify numbers, possibly learning math. Now think of the alternative- sending your immunocompromised child to school during flu season, which will absolutely land you in the er, or worse. You don’t even want to think about the or worse.
-Port accesses- we already addressed how awful they are- but lets get real. How horrible are your kids for their flu shots or immunizations? Now double the size of the needle- going directly into their chest.
-Chemo treatments will make your healthy child just plain sick. Stomach aches, loss of appetite, throwing up, fatigue. And the best thing to do for chemo- food. It’s letting your kid eat anything they want just to try and help them through the process.
-Prescription meds. We struggled alot with these. It was every morning and every night. Think of how hard it is to get your child to take their cold medicine. Now have them take anti nausea meds, appetite stimulants, miralax, prescription mouthwash (that tastes horrendous) and have them do all of this- every day.
-Ct scans. Ct scans have as much radiation as 200 chest xrays. He will get these done twice a year for the next three years. They will then go to once a year. This increases his risk of a acquiring a cancer later on in life.
-Puke buckets. He had one in any vehicle he was driving in and kept one at his bedside, because you just never knew when he would heave a good one.
This is what 4% gets us. It is saving lives, but think of what we could do with more than 4%? The kids deserve more than 4% of funding from the government.
#morethan4
#brodystrong
