Warriors and Survivors - 253

Children Cancer Stories by Rukh Yusuf - Blog # 253

I am Rukh Yusuf, Clinical Pharmacist, also specialized in Total Parenteral Nutrition and Bone Marrow Transplant. I have worked in the Pediatric Oncology unit of a public hospital. The mission of this blog is to bring to you the real-life stories of child patients suffering from cancer. Cancer is still a difficult disease to handle and treat. However, when it strikes the children, some so young that they cannot even speak, their agony is beyond expression and words. Let us pray especially for children suffering from cancer for early and complete remission. May Allah shower His Merciful Blessings upon them. Aameen.

This week marks the beginning of a new chapter in our pediatric oncology stories. Over the past months, we have shared journeys from within our own center, but now we are opening this space to stories from pediatric oncology units across Pakistan and beyond. Each center carries its own experiences, its own challenges, and its own children who quietly endure the long path of treatment. Through this series, we hope to bring forward voices and journeys from different hospitals, reminding us that the struggle against childhood cancer is shared not only by children and families but also by healthcare team across many places.

Our first story in this new series comes from the Pediatric Oncology Unit at MTA Khyber Teaching Hospital, Peshawar, where children receive dedicated care under the supervision of Dr. Muhammad Kashif Afridi and his team. Among the many children treated there is Farha, whose journey over the past year reflects both the difficulties of treatment and the hope that follows.

Farha was diagnosed with Wilms tumor more than a year ago. For her family, the diagnosis came as a sudden and overwhelming moment. Like many parents, they entered the hospital seeking answers for their child’s symptoms, only to find themselves facing a reality they had never imagined. The early days after diagnosis were filled with fear, confusion, and countless questions about treatment, recovery, and the future.

Treatment began soon after diagnosis and continued for over a year. This long course required regular hospital visits, chemotherapy sessions, laboratory tests, and continuous monitoring. For Farha, hospital corridors became familiar. She learned to sit through procedures, take medications on time, and adjust to a routine that revolved around treatment schedules. Some days were easier than others. There were moments when she felt energetic and playful, and other times when fatigue and treatment side effects made even simple activities challenging.

Cancer treatment changes the rhythm of childhood. School attendance often pauses. Playtime becomes limited. Physical strength fluctuates with each treatment cycle. Children may not always express their fears, but they experience the emotional weight of repeated hospital visits and medical procedures. Yet many children adapt in quiet ways. They find comfort in small routines, familiar faces in the hospital, and the steady presence of their caregivers.

Families face their own parallel challenges during this period. Parents often spend long hours at the hospital while trying to maintain stability at home. Financial concerns can slowly build over months of treatment. Emotional exhaustion becomes part of daily life as each scan and laboratory report brings renewed anxiety. Siblings also feel the shift in family attention and routine. Despite these pressures, families continue forward with determination, guided by hope and by the strength they see in their child.

Farha’s journey followed this demanding path. Under the care of Dr. Muhammad Kashif Afridi and his team, she remained on treatment for more than a year. Each phase required patience and resilience from both Farha and her family. Over time, small milestones began to appear completion of treatment cycles, encouraging test results, and gradual improvement in her health.

Today, Farha has reached a hopeful and reassuring stage. She has completed her treatment and is now doing well. She has been declared cured and remains under regular follow-up to monitor her continued health. Follow-up visits now serve as reminders of recovery rather than sources of fear. Each visit marks another step away from illness and toward a normal childhood.

Recovery after cancer treatment is not only physical but emotional. Families slowly return to routines that once felt distant. Children regain strength, confidence, and the ability to engage again in school and play. For Farha and her family, this phase brings relief and gratitude after a long and challenging year.

As we begin sharing stories from pediatric oncology centers across Pakistan, Farha’s journey reminds us of the many children who walk this difficult path and emerge stronger. It also highlights the ongoing challenges families face throughout treatment and the importance of consistent care and support. This new series will continue to bring forward such journeys from different centers and cities, each story not only bring the struggle of suffering child and family but also highlights the efforts of treating physician and healthcare team.

Prayers for Farha and all the sick children and their families who have to face this pain of cancer. May Allah make it easy for them. Aameen

Note: “The child’s name has been changed to protect privacy, and the accompanying image is AI-generated.”

Warriors and Survivors - 252

Children Cancer Stories by Rukh Yusuf - Blog # 252

I am Rukh Yusuf, Clinical Pharmacist, also specialized in Total Parenteral Nutrition and Bone Marrow Transplant. I have worked in the Pediatric Oncology unit of a public hospital. The mission of this blog is to bring to you the real-life stories of child patients suffering from cancer. Cancer is still a difficult disease to handle and treat. However, when it strikes the children, some so young that they cannot even speak, their agony is beyond expression and words. Let us pray especially for children suffering from cancer for early and complete remission. May Allah shower His Merciful Blessings upon them. Aameen. 

Zahra is eight years old and has always preferred quiet games. She likes arranging her pencils in straight lines, braiding her doll’s hair, and sitting beside her mother while homework is being done at the dining table. Until a few months ago, her days followed a predictable schedule: school, home, dinner, and bedtime stories. Now her days are measured differently by hospital visits, blood counts, and the slow ticking of clocks in waiting rooms.

Her diagnosis came without warning. A few weeks of fatigue, a fever that didn’t settle, and bruises that appeared without explanation. At first, her parents thought it was just a lingering infection or perhaps the strain of school. The word leukemia entered their lives during a hospital appointment that was meant to reassure them. Instead, it rearranged everything.

They live far from extended family. The nearest relatives are hours away, and most of their friends remain in their hometown. For treatment, Zahra and her parents had to move temporarily to a city with a pediatric oncology center. They now live in a small rented apartment close to the hospital, a place that feels neither like home nor a place of rest. Suitcases remain half-packed in the corner, as if they are always preparing for the next sudden admission.

Travel has become routine. Early morning drives for appointments. Late-night returns after unexpected fevers. Sometimes, they travel back home briefly to collect clothes or check on things left behind, only to return again for treatment cycles. The road between the two cities has become familiar but never comforting.

Zahra does not fully understand what leukemia means. She knows it has something to do with her blood and that she needs medicines that make her feel tired and sometimes more sick. She notices the change in her parents’ faces more than anything else. They speak softly now, often in hushed tones outside hospital rooms or over phone calls they think she cannot hear. Visitors speak gently when they come. Nurses smile more than usual. Even strangers seem to look at her with a kind of careful attention that she never asked for.

In the hospital ward, Zahra sees many children. Some are younger, some older. Many have lost their hair. Some sit quietly with tablets or coloring books. Others lie in beds attached to IV lines, their parents beside them. She does not ask many questions, but she watches. The chemo bay, with its rows of chairs and infusion pumps, has become a place she recognizes too well. She has begun to understand that many of the children there are fighting something similar, even if she doesn’t know the details.

Sometimes she wonders why there are so many of them.

Her younger brother stays with relatives most of the time now. When he visits, he seems unsure how to behave. He misses his sister but feels out of place in hospital corridors and small apartments. Video calls have replaced shared meals and bedtime arguments. The family feels divided across locations, connected by schedules and updates rather than daily life.

For Zahra’s parents, uncertainty is constant. Each test result brings a mix of relief and new worry. They try to remain composed during consultations, taking notes, asking questions, and nodding as doctors explain treatment phases and side effects. Later, in private, they revisit every word, trying to understand what lies ahead. Sleep comes in short intervals. The fear of losing their child sits quietly in the background, never fully spoken but always present.

Zahra senses some of this without understanding it completely. She knows something serious is happening because everyone around her behaves as if it is. She misses school and her friends but does not always say so. Instead, she asks simple questions: when she can go home, when she can sleep in her own bed again, when the medicines will stop.

On some evenings, after returning from the hospital, she sits by the window of their temporary apartment and watches the street below. Cars pass, people walk, life continues. Inside, her parents prepare meals, sort medications, and plan the next day’s hospital visit. The routine is heavy but necessary.

Life has become uncertain, but it has not stopped. It moves forward in careful steps, through hospital corridors, along highways between cities, and inside the quiet spaces of a family learning to live with a diagnosis they never expected.

Prayers for Zahra and all the sick children and their families who have to face this pain of cancer. May Allah make it easy for them. Aameen

Note: “The child’s name has been changed to protect privacy, and the accompanying image is AI-generated.”

Warriors and Survivors - 251

Children's Cancer Stories by Rukh Yusuf—Blog #251

I am Rukh Yusuf, Clinical Pharmacist, also specialized in Total Parenteral Nutrition and Bone Marrow Transplant. I have worked in the Pediatric Oncology unit of a public hospital. The mission of this blog is to bring to you the real-life stories of child patients suffering from cancer. Cancer is still a difficult disease to handle and treat. However, when it strikes the children, some so young that they cannot even speak, their agony is beyond expression and words. Let us pray especially for children suffering from cancer for early and complete remission. May Allah shower His Merciful Blessings upon them. Aameen. 

Khurram is eight now. Three months ago, his life was all about simple school routine, cricket with his friends outside his home, and evenings spent sharing stories with his parents and siblings. Today, life has changed altogether. Now, life is all about hospital corridors, blood tests, lab reports, and medical jargons that no child should have to learn so early i.e., leukemia, chemotherapy, counts, and recovery.

He belongs to a middle-class family of Gujrat which is a small city in Punjab. The family that had always measured life in practical, small hopeful steps. Khurram is their only son, the center of their life and quiet dreams for the future. 

While witnessing journeys of these children and families, sometimes, a quiet question arises in my mind: what is more difficult for parents, to have an only child facing such a cruel disease, where every hope and every fear rests on one fragile life? Or to have more than one child, and watching the illness of one ripple through the emotional world of all of them, gently reshaping childhood for each of them? 

There is no simple answer, because mostly pain and pain related feelings cannot be described in words.

For parents of an only child, the hospital room can feel overwhelmingly silent. Their entire world seems to narrow into one small bed, one treatment chart, one set of lab reports that determine everything. Every appointment carries the  fear, the weight of future. There are no siblings at home to fill the quiet spaces, no distraction from the constant awareness that all their dreams are tied to this one fragile life. Their love for the only child becomes both their strength and their weakness, tied together by hope that must remain steady even on the most uncertain days.

Yet for families with multiple children, the challenge unfolds differently but no less deeply. When one child is diagnosed with cancer, the illness does not stay confined to hospital walls. It quietly enters the lives of other children as well. They watch routines change; they sense the worry in their parents’ voices. They learn, far earlier than expected, that life can become serious without warning. Birthdays are celebrated softly, school achievements may pass silently. Attention becomes divided, not by choice, but by necessity.

Parents in such families often carry a silent burden of balance,  sitting beside one child in a hospital room while worrying about another waiting at home. They try to protect each child from fear while managing their own. They strive to keep normalcy alive in a home that has been touched by uncertainty. Love, in these homes, stretches across multiple emotional needs, often leaving parents exhausted but still determined as they do not have other choice.

Pediatric cancer, in truth, never belongs to just one child. It gently weaves itself into the emotional life of an entire family. It asks parents to remain strong even when they feel fragile. It asks siblings to understand circumstances that even adults struggle to process. It asks families to hold onto hope while learning to live with unpredictability.

Perhaps the question is not which situation is harder. Perhaps the more meaningful reflection is how we, as a community, can make either path less heavy.

In the end, what matters most is not comparing one hardship to another but responding with compassion to all of them. When communities become more aware, more present, and more willing to support, the burden begins to feel a little lighter. And for families walking through the long and uncertain road of pediatric cancer, even small gestures of understanding can make a difference.

Awareness is not only about understanding disease statistics or treatment protocols. It is about recognizing the quiet emotional realities families live through every day. It is about kindness; it’s about feeling the pain of people around. It is about offering support that is thoughtful rather than purposeful, a kind word, a shared resource, a gesture that reminds parents and children that they are not alone in this journey.

Every child deserves a future shaped by possibility rather than illness. And every effort, no matter how small, brings that future a little closer.

Prayers for Khurram and all the sick children and their families who have to face this pain of cancer. May Allah make it easy for them. Aameen

Note: “The child’s name has been changed to protect privacy, and the accompanying image is AI-generated.”