Collaboration between EONS and European cancer treatment centres, alongside exploring how Europe’s specialised cancer nurses can work better together, is essential during this awareness month.
As an EONS Communications Working Group Member, Head Nurse and Volunteer Nurse for cancer patients, I am celebrating the success of Romanian children and teenagers who have beaten the disease at summer camps organised by the Magic Association.
At the beginning of this month, I spent a few days alongside the children I care for in the Paediatric Oncology Department at Marie Curie Children’s Hospital in Bucharest, Romania.
This experience has changed the way I see caring for a child or adolescent with cancer.
In the hospital, we often meet them through the lens of their illness: treatments, tests, procedures, pain and fear. At camp, we see them differently.
We see them laughing, playing, exploring, making friends, falling in love and making decisions for themselves again. We see them, little by little, finding their balance in life again.
For me, this is the true therapeutic value of these experiences. Camp gives children a space where their diagnosis does not define them and where they can rediscover autonomy, confidence and a sense of normality.
But the experience also transforms us, the people who care for them.
When you see your patient outside the hospital ward, you begin to know them beyond their illness. You discover their personality, their courage, their sense of humour and their dreams. For a few days, you become part of their life, 24 hours a day. That closeness inevitably changes the way you see and provide care.
I have learned that caring for a child with cancer means more than treating the disease.
It means protecting the child behind the diagnosis.
Sometimes, the most powerful therapeutic moment is seeing a child you have known through their hardest days laughing, running and enjoying life again.
Because beyond cancer, they are and will always be a child.