for NPR: Cancer interrupted their school lives, but also set them on a mission by José A. Alvarado Jr.

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for NPR: Cancer interrupted their school lives, but also set them on a mission

josé a. alvarado jr.

Jan 6, 2025

EJ Beck was a bookish, wispy 10-year-old when a doctor found the thyroid cancer on her tiny neck that upended her life. Treatment for that cancer took Beck's joyful school routine and replaced it with a complicated surgery, followed by a harrowing radiation treatment that made her so sick and radioactive, it required her to remain in a sealed chamber without human contact for many days.

Beck, along with her parents, had decided not to tell friends, her teachers or even her two younger sisters about her illness, hoping that might help her slip back into normal life, eventually. But in the short term, it intensified her isolation in the hospital, where she passed her solitary confinement rereading the Harry Potter series and drawing on a picture of Spiderman posted to the window.

"I was so, so jealous because Spiderman could just leave the hospital, and I couldn't," Beck recalls. "Spiderman got to take radiation, and he got cool powers; I got sick and sad and lonely and tired."

Today, Beck is a 23-year-old medical student, and among a growing population of 18 million people who are surviving cancer for much longer, thanks to myriad recent advances like AI-powered tumor detection and new immunotherapies that chemically target cancers. Survival rates for pediatric cancer, in particular, are considered a crowning medical achievement: Those rates increased from 58% in the mid-1970s to 85% today.

Photographed for NPR, with words by Yuki Noguchi

Cancer interrupted their school lives, but also set them on a mission
Pediatric cancer survival rates are a crowning medical achievement. But the impact of missing school is a less-discussed side effect children then face.
Npr.org

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José A. Alvarado Jr.

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