#pediatric-cancer

#pediatric-cancer

Donna Cochran had boxed up nearly every room in her Atlanta, Georgia, home - except one. The space belonged to her late daughter, Ansley, and it remained exactly as it had the day Ansley left it, with journals, jewelry and drawers filled with the cozy clothes she loved to wear. Ansley died in 2018 at 21, after a 19-year battle with neuroblastoma, a rare childhood cancer. What Cochran could not yet bring herself to dismantle was not a bedroom, but a life.

As Teena Punjwani and Deepak Nasta take stock of the last year, they sigh. "I feel like I've lived too many lifetimes in this one lifetime," Punjwani said. The San Jose couple's life together was thrown into chaos in February with a heartbreaking diagnosis: their 5-year-old son, Jayaan, had brain cancer. His parents had sensed that something was off last winter, when Jayaan's writing skills nosedived at preschool and he mysteriously lost balance on the left side of his body.

More than four million U.S. children under age 19 lacked health insurance in 2024. The uninsured rate peaked at 6.1 percentthe highest level in the past decade, according to a recent analysis by the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families, a health policy research organization. That marks a nearly 20 percent increase in the number of uninsured children nationwide since 2022.

The detention by immigration authorities of a Chicago man whose 16-year-old daughter is undergoing treatment for advanced cancer is illegal, and he must be given a bond hearing by 31 October, a federal judge has ruled. Attorneys for Ruben Torres Maldonado, 40, who was detained on 18 October, have petitioned for his release as his deportation case goes through the system.