A Guide to Good Health

How To Help Your Young Loved One With Cancer

If there is a child in your life that is struggling with cancer, you may feel helpless about the situation. This is an understandable and natural reaction. However, in spite of feeling helpless, there are things that you may be able to do to help the situation. Here are some steps that you can take to help your young loved one who is struggling with cancer. Then, you can be sure you do everything possible to provide them with help and support going forward. 

Find Out If They Need Blood or Bone Marrow

Sometimes, patients with certain types of cancer need things to help them get through cancer treatments so they can potentially go into remission. Blood, plasma, and bone marrow are some of those things that may need to be donated for your young loved one. 

Find out if you are able to donate these things yourself first. With blood, you would have to be the same blood type. With bone marrow, there are more extensive matching procedures to go through, but if you are a match a bone marrow donation could save their life.

If you are not a match for either of these things, you could start a social media page or something similar to try to get people to donate blood that match and direct the donation to your young loved one. You could also try to search for people willing to get tested for being a bone marrow match. 

Set Up a Child Cancer Donation Program in Their Name

If you cannot directly help your young loved one with their cancer treatments, setting up a fundraiser for a child cancer donation charity, to be donated in your loved one's name, is another great way to go. You can do all sorts of fundraising activities for a child cancer charity that your young loved one may even be able to participate in. 

Bake sales, runs and walks, and other fundraising events are all things that you could go about organizing in the name of charity and of your young loved one. Children often love to be honored in this way, especially if they can participate or attend fundraising events. If they cannot, you can always help them to attend virtually with a video chat or call as well. 

Raising money and setting up a donation program for children with cancer and for childhood cancer research will help you to give back while at the same time honoring your young loved one with cancer. 

Now that you know a few ways you can help your young loved one with cancer, you can get the process started as soon as possible.