Now she is 30, she works in Manchester (United Kingdom) as a graphic designer and although the cancer she suffered in adolescence has taken its toll on her -she is still in pain and has a prosthetic leg-, she has been free of the disease for more than a decade.
On International Childhood Cancer Day, Andrea tells EFEsalud about her experience in her adolescence. She does it from Brussels, where she is for a few days since she belongs to the European organization of young people with cancer (Youth Cancer Europe, YCE) and has had several meetings.
Pediatric tumors are rare diseases that affect just over 1,000 minors in Spain each year. Survival stands at 80% of cases, a figure that has changed little in recent years. Andrea was told that she only had a 30% chance of getting ahead.
She clearly remembers that she was in her mother’s town when the pain in her knee began. “They told me don’t worry, it will be tendonitis, but it continued to hurt to such an extent that I had to bandage it and take ibuprofen because it swelled a lot,” she explains.
A seen and not seen
She went with her aunt, who was a nurse, to the Zamora health center, her parents stayed in the town, nobody thought it was something serious. There she had an X-ray and the pediatrician told them that they had to go to the hospital “because she didn’t look good.”
After an MRI and a CT scan at the hospital, the next day I was already at the Niño Jesús Hospital in Madrid. “It was a seen and not seen practically,” says Andrea.
“I was very confused, it also coincided with the move we made from Extremadura to Salamanca, with a new school and everything. The doctor told me that I had Ewing’s sarcoma and I thought, but what is this gentleman telling me? It was all so fast… They organize your agenda for practically a year and I said, well, this is what it is, ”he says.
Ewing’s sarcoma is a malignant bone tumor that forms in bone or soft tissue. It mainly affects adolescents and young adults. Andrea’s was the one with the worst prognosis, he adds his mother, Pilar Flores, to EFEsalud.
“You don’t believe it, you almost have no option to think, in our case it was all so fast that the only thing you want is for him to recover. It never crossed my mind that it was going to go wrong. It was still a resource of mine to be able to cope with it,” adds Pilar, who is also a manager of the Spanish Federation of Parents of Children with Cancer.
Andrea was also optimistic.
Vomiting begins, tiredness, cold…
The treatment began and with it came fatigue, vomiting and hair loss. She lived practically a year in the hospital. He did not stop studying, he continued his course through the hospital classroom of the Child Jesus.
Passport photos of Andrea during treatment. courtesy photoShe remembers having her head “put into the pillow like an ostrich” and “pissed off at the world” because the vomiting was very uncomfortable and, above all, the cold that she felt in her head, which is why she always spent the day “with the hood on.” .
Each treatment cycle was five days, then she had several days off and had tests done to control her defenses; if they were low, she would re-enter, joining her with the next cycle.
But as soon as he left the hospital, since his leg no longer hurt and he could walk better, he wanted to do things, he wanted to move. Three months later she had an MRI and a spot she had on her lung had disappeared. The treatment was working. They also did an autotransplant of her own cells.
“I spent a year with her suffering all the treatments, the aftermath, but she made it easy, she is a child with a spirit that accepted everything, and she has always pushed forward. But, undoubtedly, cancer is a catastrophe for the family, it is a turning point in life, ”says her mother.
The ordeal of the leg
And they operated on her, they removed the piece of tibia, where the tumor was, and they put titanium plates with a piece of bone from the bone bank. One of her problems was that the plates and the screws that put it on broke, she even bent an internal nail in the tibia. Her body was breaking him.
He had to spend five months with a cast.
“The theory is that since the bone was not strong enough, it was the plate that supported the weight, but I don’t know if that was it or what,” Andrea points out. The fact is that a year after starting the treatment she was free of the disease but her leg continued to give her trouble.
In the last fifteen years he has had several prostheses. Until in 2021 he decided to have part of his leg amputated. They had tried everything but he was still in severe pain.
Now he is still in pain, but much less than before. She has phantom limb syndrome, meaning she continues to feel as if she has the missing part of her leg and foot. “The issue of pain is already long-term side effects of chemotherapy from hip punctures and that a lot of scoliosis was generated and now she is readjusting everything and it hurts,” says the young woman.
life after cancer
He left cancer behind as a teenager. Andrea, she is 30 years old and for four years she has lived in Manchester, a city to which she moved for love and then for work. She studied Fine Arts in Salamanca. She is a graphic designer, she hasn’t missed a year, neither from high school, nor from university.
And what would Andrea say to a boy or girl in their teens who, like her, has been diagnosed with cancer? people who have been through the same thing. That she is she a big bitch? yes, but that time will pass, too”.
The young woman has been part of the YCE, formed by youth organizations against cancer from all over Europe, since 2014. And she is also involved in a two-year project to create a European network of young cancer survivors. That is why she has traveled to Brussels, where she has had meetings with Childhood Cancer International (the international organization for childhood cancer).
Cancer units during adolescence, research…
Based on her experience, Andrea would like all hospitals to have units for adolescents because in these cases you are either with younger children or with adults. She was lucky, in the Child Jesus they always try to put them with the friends they make during her stay. Her mother also claims them so that in no case are they with adults.
Pilar also underlines other claims that the Spanish Federation of Parents of Children with Cancer has, such as that parents can be with them 24 hours a day during hospital stays and seven days a week. And that the rooms are enabled for the companion. She spent a year sleeping in an armchair.
Research is another of the needs that the Federation points out but also thea Spanish Society of Pediatric Hematology and Oncology (SEHOP) y the Spanish Association of Pediatrics (AEP) that calls for a legal and logistical framework that facilitates the inclusion of patients in clinical trials.
EFE/Angel Medina G.Both societies consider it “especially necessary” that all the autonomous communities have pediatric palliative care units and home hospitalization to guarantee the best quality for the patient and their family “in the last phases of their illness”.
They insist that pediatric cancers are rare diseases that require the attention of multidisciplinary teams and that it be recognized, as in other European countries, Pediatric Oncology and Hematology specialty.
Networking between units of greater and lesser complexity so that children and adolescents with cancer benefit from the best diagnosis, is another of the requests that the SEHOP and the AEO collect in a statement on the occasion of this day.