09/04/2026
DAY 4 — CHILDHOOD CANCER AWARENESS MONTH 💛🎗️
Let me make childhood cancer research funding painfully simple.
Imagine there are 100 dollars sitting on a table.
$100 to fight cancer.
You would think children would get a meaningful piece of that money, right?
But approximately $4 out of every $100 of the National Cancer Institute’s cancer research budget goes toward childhood cancer.
$4.
That’s it.
And the other $96?
Goes toward cancer research focused primarily on adults.
Now think about that for a minute.
Because behind that $4 are children.
Children like Finley.
Children who didn’t smoke.
Didn’t drink.
Didn’t make unhealthy choices.
Didn’t get decades of life to develop cancer.
They were simply children who got cancer.
And when your child gets cancer, you don’t care that it’s considered “rare.”
You don’t care that statistically there aren’t as many cases.
You care that YOUR CHILD is one of them.
You care that your child is lying in a hospital bed receiving chemotherapy.
You care that she’s missing school.
Missing birthday parties.
Missing sleepovers.
Missing the carefree childhood she deserves.
You care that the medicine keeping her alive can also cause damage to her growing body.
You care that there are still childhood cancers where researchers don’t have enough answers.
And you care that families are forced to hear words no parent should ever have to hear:
“Your child has cancer.”
So when someone tells me childhood cancer is rare…
I want them to understand something.
Rare does not mean insignificant.
Rare does not mean less devastating.
Rare does not mean these children deserve less research.
And rare certainly does not mean we should accept the status quo.
Because $4 is not enough.
Not when children are dying.
Not when survivors can face lifelong consequences from the treatments that saved them.
Not when parents are begging for more options.
Not when researchers still need answers.
And not when every single childhood cancer diagnosis represents an entire family whose life has been changed forever.
We need people to know.
We need people to care.
We need funding.
We need research.
We need better treatments.
We need safer treatments.
We need more clinical trials.
We need answers.
Because childhood cancer may be rare…
but our children are not disposable.
That $4 has a name.
It has a face.
It has a laugh.
It has a favorite color.💜💛
It has a family who would give absolutely anything to make their child well.
For us, that $4 has a name: Finley. 💛
And until every child gets the chance to grow up…
we will keep fighting.
💛🎗️
