A young mother has raised awareness for childhood cancer by sharing her baby son’s story.
Aly Borst, 22 and from New Zealand, is mom to 20-month-old Noah, who was diagnosed with brain cancer at just nine months old.
Noah’s parents first noticed something was wrong when he appeared to have stopped using his left arm out of nowhere, just after he had reached the milestone of learning how to clap.
“About a week later we noticed he was clapping by hitting his leg with his right hand,” Borst told Newsweek. “More and more, we noticed his left arm would just hang to the side, and stayed closed in a fist.”
In September, Borst shared Noah’s story in a video to her TikTok account @coffeealyyy, with September being Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.
The video begins with nine-month-old Noah playing with the safety belt in his car seat, but “not using his left arm”—and the next slide showed him in a hospital bed, revealing he had been “diagnosed with brain cancer at nine months old.”
It showed Noah’s time in hospital, with bandages and a cranial surgery scar, but still sitting up and giving smiles to his parents, reading books and playing with toys.
Everything happened extremely quickly, Borst explained to Newsweek. After they brought him to the doctor to question him not using his arm, Noah was rushed for an MRI the very next day, with Aly recalling the “terrifying” knowledge that “something was wrong.”
“We got the results a few hours later, telling us he has a massive tumor and that it’s in a dangerous spot; that we have to move to another city immediately to go to a children’s hospital.”
They packed up their lives and moved to the new city, where they stayed in hospital with their son for almost a month, as he underwent two brain surgeries and began chemotherapy.
One surgery saw Noah fitted with a shunt in his head, which leads to his stomach, draining fluid from his brain—and “this is something he has to have forever.” And, despite his young age, Noah is now on an oral chemotherapy treatment which will last for two years.
However, the intensive therapy has yielded “amazing” results, with Borst revealing her now almost-two-year-old son’s tumor “has shrunk significantly in the past 11 months.”
“He’s still unable to use his left hand [and] arm, but he has been doing physical therapy,” she said.
Noah’s next MRI scan to monitor his progress is due in October, and while Borst says the journey has been “long,” and there is “still more to go,” Noah is “alive and as healthy as he can be, so we are extremely grateful.”
Borst’s video has been viewed more than 800,000 times, as thousands of strangers flooded the comments with prayers and well wishes, as one wrote: “I will never understand why kids get cancer.”
“Prayers little buddy, you’re gonna win this fight,” one said, as another admitted: “I look at my 11 month old and I couln’t imagine. Poor baby. I hope he is doing OK now.”
And another shared: “My son had brain cancer at the age of three. It’s a mother’s worst nightmare. Wishing him all the best.” She then revealed that her son is now 38, and while he has lingering effects from the illness, he is independent and now a father himself.
In the United States, an estimated 15,780 children up to 19 years of age are diagnosed with cancer, and more than 300,000 children diagnosed each year, according to the American Childhood Cancer Organization.
September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month; according to the American Association for Cancer Research, the most common cancers in children are acute lymphotic leukemia, brain and other central nervous system tumors, and neuroblastoma.
Research into childhood cancers means the five-year survival rate for pediatric cancer has improved dramatically—from between 58–68 percent in the 1970s to 83–88 percent in recent years.
Do you have a tip on a health story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about cancer? Let us know via health@newsweek.com.
Read the full article here
