What I Wish Every Person Knew About Childhood Cancer, In Six Numbers
I have spent four years of my life inside the world of childhood cancer. I am still surprised, weekly, by how little the rest of the world knows about it.
This is not anyone's fault. Childhood cancer is rare. Most people will never meet a family in active treatment. The numbers that define this world live in nonprofit reports and oncology journals and they almost never reach the dinner table.
But these are the numbers that govern thousands of childhoods every year. And the more people who know them, the harder it gets for childhood cancer to stay invisible.
September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. Here are the six numbers I would put in front of every person I love, if I had the chance.
8 percent.
That is the share of federal cancer research funding allocated to pediatric cancers in the United States, despite childhood cancer being the leading disease-related cause of death in children.
My son was treated using a chemotherapy protocol that has barely changed in decades. Not because the science is not capable of better. Because the funding has not been there.
When you wonder why families like ours raise money the way we do, the answer is in this number. The infrastructure that would have backed us up has not been built.
80 to 120.
That is the average number of medical appointments a child with cancer attends in the first year after diagnosis.
I counted my son's. Somewhere between 80 and 100 in his first twelve months, and probably closer to 100 once the inpatient stays were added in. Two visits a week, on average. Some weeks five. Some weeks seven. Almost no weeks zero.
That is the calendar of a childhood cancer family. That is what a parent is holding when you ask them how they are doing.
20 to 40 percent.
That is the share of household income the average childhood cancer family loses during active treatment.
We did not lose income. My husband and I kept our day jobs because we could not afford to stop. We answered emails in the infusion room. We took meetings from the hospital parking lot. That is one version of what families do.
Other families lose income because they cannot work and parent through three medical appointments a week at the same time. They give up jobs. They leave the workforce. They make the math add up the only way they can.
Cancer extracts a cost from a family. It just decides which one.
$833,000.
That is the average lifetime cost of treating a child with cancer, before survivorship care is counted.
Most of that is covered by insurance. Some of it is not. And insurance does not cover the gas, the parking, the cafeteria food, the lost vacation time, the prescription co-pays, the childcare for the sibling, the wear and tear on the car, or the way grocery shopping starts costing more because you have no time to compare prices.
The medical bill is the headline. The rest of the math is the part nobody photographs.
1 in 5.
That is the number of children diagnosed with cancer who live in poverty at the time of diagnosis.
This is the number that gets me up in the morning.
When I started Maxwell's Toy Box, I did not know this statistic. I learned it after we had already started showing up for families. Once I learned it, I could not stop thinking about it.
One in five families hearing the word leukemia for the first time also does not have the savings to cover the next month of gas. One in five children walking into an oncologist's office is doing so from inside a financial reality the medical system does not see.
That is the number behind every $50 gas card and every $100 grocery card Maxwell's Toy Box sends. It is the reason that direct family support is our highest priority program for 2026. The cost of cancer has not changed dramatically. The cost of everything else has.
2.
That is how old my son was when he was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
His sister was six months old. She did not know what a hospital was. She did not know what a brother was, not in the way she does now.
He was barely a person when this started. He still is, in a lot of ways. He just spent two and a half years of his small life learning what a port is, how to sit through an infusion, what a long inpatient stay feels like, and what to do when the parents in the room are scared.
This is what childhood cancer takes from a family. Not just from the parents. Not just from the medical bill. From the child themselves, who is making the most important early developmental memories of their life inside a hospital instead of inside a backyard.
I cannot make those years back for him. Nobody can.
What I can do is make sure that the families behind us walk into the same hallways with more in their corner. That is what these six numbers are for.
If you have read this far.
You now know more about childhood cancer than most Americans. You know the funding gap. You know the appointment calendar. You know the family economics. You know the lifetime cost. You know the poverty rate. You know the age my son was when this began for our family.
What you do with these numbers next is up to you. You can share this post. You can donate. You can volunteer. You can ask the cancer family in your life how they actually are. You can keep these numbers in your head the next time someone tells you childhood cancer is rare, or random, or “the worst thing we hope never happens.” It is all of those things. It is also being navigated, right now, by tens of thousands of American families who could use the rest of us to know what they are carrying.
Childhood Cancer Awareness Month is September.
We need it the other eleven months too.
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
