Improve Cancer Care for 270 Children in Myanmar

Megan Cruise is a trained counsellor with extensive experience in supporting children with cancer, and their families, in the UK and developing countries.

Over the past three months, Megan has been working in Myanmar where she has been delivering her training package to nurses, doctors and social workers whilst also providing counselling support to families.

We caught up with Megan and spoke to her about coping with childhood cancer in developing countries:

“Having spent the majority of the past year volunteering in developing countries, it has made me very aware of how lucky we are in the UK to have access to free healthcare. Knowing that the country in which you are born in determines the level of treatment and care available to you has really struck me and become even more apparent from my voluntary experiences. The availability of cancer drugs can in some cases be the difference between living and dying. However, I have also noticed how in life, the less we have the more resourceful we become.

The families I work with are going through one of the most painful, heart breaking, challenging and potentially devasting experiences of their lives. When their child is diagnosed with cancer, their lives are turned upside down and everything changes. Having someone outside their circle of family and friends, a professional who they talk to about how they are feeling, to cry with, to release anger with, to just sit with, can lighten the load slightly and make life a little bit more manageable.

There are many things that make coping with childhood cancer especially difficult for families. Spending extended periods of time away from home, the side effects of treatment, possible disfigurement, changes in image, missing large chunks of school, huge financial impacts are all attributing factors. The emotional needs of these families are enormous so providing them with an outlet to express their emotions is essential.”

As well as supporting families, Megan has been delivering workshops to nurses and medical professionals at hospital who also lack emotional support:

“When delivering training to nurses and clinical staff it has been clear to me that working with children with cancer has a big emotional impact on the staff. In every country the staff are keen to talk about the emotional impact and they are grateful for the opportunity to talk about how they feel and receive some support.

I have always known how healing talking can be but having had this experience of working in different counties where counselling is not so common, it has emphasised even more, to me how important talking is - giving families and staff the space and time to talk about how they are feeling and share their emotions is essential.

In some countries people are not aware that children can get cancer, and this can be very isolating for the families who do have a child with cancer. Having someone they can talk to about this can be provide a relief.”

Volunteering in different countries with varying cultures has not come without its challenges as Megan explains:

“I had not predicted that language would be such a challenge in Myanmar and this meant my work took a bit of time to get started. I now have an interpreter which is fantastic. I can now communicate fully with families and all the staff.

Since I arrived in Myanmar, a few local people have expressed concerns about whether parents would open up to me because my type of work is very new here and that people can be quite reserved in sharing their feelings but this has not been the case. Many parents have shared their thoughts almost straight away – they are keen to speak to someone about their situation and how they are feeling.”

As well as providing funds to cover essential treatment costs, World Child Cancer also develops twinning partnerships between healthcare professionals in the developed world, like Megan, and those in developing countries. Megan’s work will have a lasting impact on standards of treatment and care for children with cancer in Myanmar, and also help the incredible healthcare professionals with the day to day pressures of supporting these children.

Links:

• Counselling in Myanmar

It was last month, on my first programme visit to Yangon Children’s Hospital in Myanmar, when I met plucky, 11-year-old Yaza. As a relatively new member of staff at World Child Cancer, it was also my first visit to a paediatric oncology unit. It was nerve-wracking. I wondered how I would react to seeing children and families going through some of the most difficult times of their lives. 

It was hard, but also inspiring. I was privileged to meet brave kids like Yaza who show amazing strength while going through the most gruelling treatment. Yaza lives in the small city of Bogalay in Southwest Myanmar with his parents and elder brother. It’s a three-hour drive from Yangon Children’s Hospital where he is receiving chemotherapy. Before his diagnosis, Yaza was just like the millions of other young boys across the world; a long, exciting future ahead of him. Then he started to suffer from breathing difficulties.

With Yaza’s father working in the rice fields, Chewa, Yaza’s mother, was left to travel to the nearest healthcare centre to help her son who was, by then, also developing high fevers. After several referrals, Chewa and her son finally reached Yangon Children’s Hospital.

“They told me my son had cancer, I never even knew that children could develop cancer. I felt so worried and cried all day.” Yaza had been diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia – an aggressive cancer that affects the white blood cells.

A determined mother, Chewa has stayed with her son at hospital for over two months now whilst Yaza receives chemotherapy. Yaza’s father continues to work and care for his other son, but spending so much time apart is a considerable hardship for the family; both emotionally and financially. With Chewa unable to work the rice fields, they are losing out on vital income.

Sadly, Yaza’s cancer has affected his memory; a blood clot in his brain has meant he forgets simple things like his favourite subject at school and even who his mother is.

But there is hope for Yaza, and he is in capable hands at Yangon Children’s Hospital, which World Child Cancer has been supporting for four years now with notable impact. The quality of treatment being provided is high. I met with Dr Aye Aye Khaing whose work ethic and dedication to the paediatric oncology unit is admirable. It’s clear to see the team and hospital as a whole benefit greatly from her guidance; she is affectionately known as the mother of the unit.

There are also challenges at the hospital. I was struck by the families’ reluctance to show and share their emotions with one another or with the staff who were on hand. Bearing the burden of having a child with cancer is daunting enough; worse that parents are dealing with it alone. WCC is supporting a volunteer Counsellor with extensive experience from Clic Sergeant, to spend the next three months in Myanmar to train hospital staff at Yangon and to help lift some of that burden. Her work aims to allow families and healthcare workers to learn to support each other through such hard times.

Speaking to the team at Yangon Hospital, it was clear that treatment abandonment is also a major issue and is disheartening for the staff on the ward. When a child begins to look or feel better, parents will often return home with their child without completing treatment. This is usually due to a lack of finances, with families unable to afford the cost of treatment, or losing income, whilst others simply do not understand how vital it is to complete treatment.

I came away from my first programme visit with a strong awareness for the challenges ahead but also with optimism for what we can achieve. Our future aims for Myanmar will involve improving services and supporting families further at Yangon Children’s Hospital, as well as extending our work to further paediatric oncology treatment centres in Myanmar, developing a new set of treatment guidelines and supporting the training of GPs across the country. With help from our supporters, we can give children in Myanmar the treatment and care that they need to battle cancer. 

Links:

• What World Child Cancer does
• Where World Child Cancer works