The Family Conversation About Why Our Son's Medicine Is Old
My husband and I had a conversation in our kitchen last spring that I've been thinking about for months.
Our son had just finished active treatment. I was going through a folder of his medical records, filing things away, when I stopped on a page that listed the drugs he'd been given over three and a half years. Vincristine. Methotrexate. 6-mercaptopurine. Doxorubicin. Cyclophosphamide. Prednisone. Dexamethasone. Cytarabine.
I already knew all these words. I'd been saying them for years. But I hadn't ever, in one sitting, looked up when each drug was first developed.
So I did.
6-mercaptopurine, 1953.
Vincristine, 1963.
Methotrexate, developed in the early 1950s from Sidney Farber's 1948 aminopterin work with children with leukemia.
Doxorubicin, 1974.
Cyclophosphamide, 1959.
Prednisone, 1955.
Every single drug my son was given to save his life was invented before I was born. Most were invented before my parents were born.
I sat at the kitchen table for a while.
When my husband came downstairs, I read him the list out loud with the years. He didn't say anything for a minute. Then he said, "Are you sure?"
I said, "I'm sure."
We looked at each other across the kitchen table, both holding coffee, both trying to work out what to feel.
What we knew and did not know
We knew our son's cancer had been cured. We knew the survival rate for his specific diagnosis, standard-risk B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, is now around 90 percent. We knew that survival rate is a modern miracle. Before 1948, when Sidney Farber first put a child with leukemia into brief remission with aminopterin, the diagnosis was universally fatal within weeks. What Farber started in 1948 changed everything. Every child who has survived pediatric leukemia since then owes that survival to the science of the last 75 years.
What we hadn't known, hadn't sat with, was that most of the actual drugs are still the drugs from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. What has changed since then is not the medicine so much as how it's delivered. Better protocols. Better supportive care. Better infection control. Better anti-nausea drugs. Better management of side effects. All of it real, all of it hard-won. But the chemotherapy itself, the toxic stuff going into our son's port every other Thursday for three years, is the same chemotherapy that pediatric oncologists gave children in the 1970s.
What that means at our kitchen table
It means our son will live with the long-term effects of drugs that were designed decades ago, before anyone understood how they'd shape a young body over a lifetime.
It means our survivorship clinic will monitor his heart because doxorubicin can quietly damage the heart muscle for years after the last dose. It means they'll monitor his fertility. His growth. His cognitive function. His risk of developing a secondary cancer.
It means we, our family, are living inside a medical reality where the miracle of survival came at a cost the country hasn't yet done enough to lower.
What we're doing about it
My husband and I have started, quietly, to become advocacy people. Not the loud kind. The reading-more, giving-to-research-foundations-instead-of-just-family-support-orgs, calling-our-congressperson kind.
We started because of that folder on the kitchen table. Because if the drugs that saved our son's life were invented before we were born, and if a family sitting at a kitchen table three years from now is going to have the exact same list, we have to be part of what changes it.
This whole month, September 2026, I'm going to be writing about the treatment gap. Not because we're ungrateful. We are so grateful. Our son is here. That's because of decades of work by researchers and clinicians and the families who came before us.
We're writing about the gap because the next family deserves better drugs than we had. And the family after that. And every child in an infusion chair somewhere in the world who is still being given a chemotherapy protocol built on foundations from 1948.
If you're a cancer parent reading this, I'd like you to look up when your child's drugs were first developed. I'd like you to sit with it for a minute. Then I'd like us to talk about what we can do together this September to make the next set of protocols better.
The kitchen-table conversation is where advocacy starts.
Dina
Mom of Max | Founder, Maxwell’s Toy Shoppe
Childhood Cancer Advocate 💛
Follow Us On Social
Join our movement to support children battling cancer and their families, year-round:
🎁 Donate to deliver toys to children during long cancer treatment days
🧸 Buy a toy from Maxwell’s Toy Shoppe, and 100% of proceeds support children in treatment
🎗️ Join Maxwell’s Circle of Heroes as a monthly donor to ensure families receive ongoing care
