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A Nurse and Parent Explains Navigating Pediatric Oncology During COVID-19
Sailaja Darisipudi(she/her) has previously led communications for nonprofit organizations fighting against gendered violence and worked as an educator. She believes passionately in fighting for gender equality, destigmatizing mental health, making quality health resources available across socio-economic statuses and decreasing the gap between public education and the complexities of the American health care system. At Rutgers University, Sailaja studied public health, wrote and edited for newspapers such as RU Examiner and EMSOP Chronicles and accumulated an alarming number of parking tickets. When not working, Sailaja can be found getting lost (literally and metaphorically) in new cities, overanalyzing various romance books and streaming shows and ordering all the vegetarian items at different restaurants. You can also find her on Twitter at @SailajaDee.
Darlene Dobkowski, Managing Editor for CURE® magazine, has been with the team since October 2020 and has covered health care in other specialties before joining MJH Life Sciences. She graduated from Emerson College with a Master’s degree in print and multimedia journalism. In her free time, she enjoys buying stuff she doesn’t need from flea markets, taking her dog everywhere and scoffing at decaf.
A nurse shares what it was like when her daughter was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
When she noticed her daughter vomiting, Eugenia Chong already had a lot on her mind: she was four months pregnant with her second child, working in a hospital during a global pandemic and planning a move.
Chong immediately took Florence, her 1-year-old daughter, to her pediatrician who dismissed the persistent vomiting as symptoms of a stomach virus. However, Chong, a clinical nurse specialist at Keck Medicine of USC in Los Angeles, decided to get a second opinion.
The second physician urged for Florence to be taken to the emergency room. There, she was ordered a CT scan which showed that Florence had a large tumor in her brain. After emergency surgery at the Children's Hospital Los Angeles to remove the tumor, Florence was diagnosed with stage 4 medulloblastoma, a type of brain cancer, in August 2020.
Florence celebrated her fourth birthday this year and currently has no evidence of disease (NED).
In today’s episode of the “Cancer Horizons” podcast, Chong explains what it was like to go from a nurse to a parent of a child with cancer, how the childhood cancer space has evolved in the past 20 years, the unexpected upsides of navigating cancer during the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of community as a cancer caregiver and more.
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