Children can beat cancer: He started with a slight fever, then bruises and bloody vomit came, but now he is fine and plays soccer

One, two and three. Now! It is the phrase that gives way to the reply of a bell that is strongly rung by a child. “The bell rang. Glory to the Lord”, reads the post from the Soldaditos de Dios shelter posted on Facebook and accompanied by a video of the infant who then embraces his mother and cries with happiness. With the bell the minor announced that he had overcome the cancer he was suffering from. The images were recorded at the Solca Guayaquil facilities. The idea is that the sound of the chimes fills with hope the other children who are battling this disease.

In Ecuador, 1,199 new cases of childhood cancer were diagnosed in 2021, according to figures from the Ministry of Public Health (MSP). Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is the most common cancer in children and adolescents under 15 years of age. The cancer mortality rate between 0 to 19 years is 6.2 per 100,000 inhabitants in the country; it is the second highest in South America.

Luis Espín, head of pediatric oncology at Solca Guayaquil, indicates that one of the keys to defeating childhood cancer is early diagnosis. He affirms that this pathology in children cannot be prevented, unlike in adults and in infants, all types of cancer have a high degree of malignancy, since the cancer cells are more aggressive.

The factor in favor of pediatric cancer, according to Espín, is that 80% of tumors are sensitive to treatment: “That is why early diagnosis is important, because in this way up to 80% of children can be cured. Another advantage is that children have developing bodies and some tumors, over time, can mature from being malignant to benign. Hence, children heal faster than adults.”.

Another difference is that children face the disease more positively than adults. Although they cry and get angry because they cannot play, when the treatment goes well or they go into remission they return to their normal activities “as if nothing had happened”, unlike adults or adolescents who can enter into depressive symptoms, indicates Espín .

To achieve early detection, parents must take their children to medical check-ups in a planned manner. Fever and bone pain can be cancer alerts, but these symptoms are almost common in children due to their stage of development and that is why a medical check-up is important.

Anabel Robles says that her son Neyl, when he was 4 years old, presented a feverish condition for a few days and some paleness, but she did not think it was a serious condition, since it is “normal” for children to have illnesses such as the flu at that age. However, Neyl began to complain of pain in his right ear. It is there when Anabel went to a medical center to carry out tests.

“Bruises also appeared on his body. Tests showed that his blood parameters were very low, he was already anemic. The pediatrician told me directly that he had acute lymphoblastic leukemia. He wanted me to die, my world ended at that moment. They managed to level it and gave me the transfer to Solca. He was hospitalized for 35 days“, it says.

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The treatment to be followed was defined and for three years he was with chemotherapies and constant medication. Then the controls began and moments where his defenses were lowered. Currently Neyl is 14 years old and in August of last year she rang the bell.

“After all this journey it was a great emotion that the bell rang. Always grateful to God. All his parameters are normal. He is the only survivor of 22 children who made up his treatment group.”, he points out.

Apart from going to the doctor, Anabel advises parents who are fighting cancer with their children to completely change their diet if it does not contain fruits and vegetables. She affirms that the success of her son is due to the fact that as a family they took a turn in this aspect.

“I recognize that I failed with my son’s diet, especially in the first years of his life. If he didn’t want salads he didn’t give them to him or if he wanted sweets at lunch he allowed them. That totally changed in the wake of cancer. Currently a lot of processed food has chemicals and that we give to our children. We give them bread with juice, a cake with chocolate milk instead of coladas, a cooked green”, he says. She also advises giving emotional support to the child and not being “broken” in front of him.

With this agrees Lorena Gordillo, whose son, Benjamin, was diagnosed with M3 promyelocytic leukemia when he was two and a half years old. Like Neyl, Benjamín presented a small feverish picture and Lorena thought it was a consequence of the growth of his teeth. However, two weeks later a bruise appeared under one of her eyes, the mouth inside her was sore and the fever returned. Lorena called the doctor and the specialist asked them to take the child the next day.

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“But that night he started vomiting blood and had bloody diarrhea. Her entire body was covered in bruises. We ran to the pediatrician and did the tests while he bled out. They told us that we had to go to Solca because it was something serious. Together with my husband we collapsed and we did not know what to do“, it says.

The fear they had made them not take the child to the emergency room at that time and they started looking for specialists until they found an energetic doctor: “We spent almost a whole day with that doctor and all the people criticized us, but that doctor helped us calm down and made Benjamín react and told us that we needed to take him to the hospital, but that we should be calm. We take him to the emergency“, it states.

After a critical week, the doctors defined the treatment for Benjamin. Three years of chemotherapy awaited him to treat this type of leukemia, which is rare and very aggressive. Lorena affirms that when she was “wrecked” because she was waiting for her child, a woman appeared who told her that she had leukemia as a child and that she had survived.

“That for me was an impulse because when you hear leukemia you think that it is going to die. Then I started to cross off the days until Benjamin finished his treatment.“, it says.

For her, emotional support is also essential during treatment. She says that while they were pricking her son they told him that they were going to inject him with superpowers or when he was hospitalized they made him play, they filled her room with balloons. “Joy raises her defenses and we also started a good diet.”

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Now Benjamin is 10 years old and has already overcome the disease. He has friends, plays soccer and rides horses. He only gets annual medical checkups.

Chemotherapy, surgery, and radiotherapy are the most common treatments applied to childhood cancer. In leukemias, the most frequent age range is between 2 and 7 years. In Solca Guayaquil, 60% of children with leukemia are cured and 12% abandon the controls, although they may be cured. In the case of lymphomas, 80% recover. (I)