This is the cancer dinosaur, his name is Terrill Tyrannosaurus the Tyrant. He's a real bad guy and he attacks all sorts of people, big and little and young and old. He's a real mean character and can attack lots of differnt parts of any person's body.
In kids most of the time he attacks tissue like muscle, bone, brain or spinal cord but in adults he attacks organs like lungs, colon, breast or prostate.
He can go by many names and is called different names depending on what he attacks.
blood |
leukemia (ALL, AML,CML) |
brain or spinal cord |
glioma (Astrocytoma, Medulloblastoma, Brainstem glioma, Ependymoma) |
sympathetic nervous system |
neuroblastoma |
kidney |
Wilm's tumor |
bone |
osteosarcoma or Ewings sarcoma |
soft tissue sarcoma |
rhabdomyosarcoma |
lymph system |
Hodgkins or Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma, Burkitt's or Non-Burkitt's Lymphomas |
retina of the eye |
retinoblastoma |
liver |
hepatoblastoma |
There are more body parts he attacks but these are the most common.
Terrill can also spread (metastasize) to other areas as well.
He goes by different names and the only things he is afraid of are surgery, Captain Chemo, Zapman and kids who want to get well.
For over 20 years the physicians and nurses who care for children with cancer have been putting information about the children they care for into a big computer. It's been a really big job for lots of major centers to do but the result has been wonderful. Because each center sees only a few children with specific kinds of cancers by putting all of the information in one computer it has allowed the doctors to figure out what kind of treatment would help a child the most. It also means that most of the time if a child is being treated at a large center the treatment would be the same almost anywhere in the U.S. The exception might be if a research center had a new drug or therapy that was experimental.