Comment by l-survivor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by l-survivor | Hacker News Reader

I'm ALL survivor. Treated (I think - it's been a while) approximately from Spring '00 through 2003, a mix of middle school and high school.

The treatment absolutely has a lasting impact - often due to the severe side effects of treatment. But even with notable impacts to short term memory and deep concentration I was still able to get a CS degree and work as a SWE.

Something that's shocking to me: the chronic absenteeism rate nationally is about 30%. I barely hit the threshold for that (missing 10% of school) number while going through cancer treatment. It makes me very worried about the direction of the US that so many kids are missing as much school a cancer patient.

It should also be noted that the treatment process is a big burden on families, who will probably not want their child be alone for extended hospital stays, but may need to for work.

    > notable impacts to short term memory and deep concentration

So these are permanent? Is it caused by the cancer or the drugs? Is there any peer-reviewed research on the matter?

To be clear, chronic absenteeism is defined by the US Dept of Education as: "students missing 10% or more of school". Eh, that is one day every two weeks. That's not so bad. Most kids can still get a pretty good education at that level.

Hello,

Here's more info on the side effects to memory.

* https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6089371/ * https://curesearch.org/Learning-Problems-During-or-After-Tre...

I think this sums it up (from the NIH study):

"methotrexate exposure has also been associated with persistent cognitive deficits among survivors, including impairments of memory, attention, and executive functions"

My daughter recovered from Leukemia (ALL). She's healthy now, but it was a nightmare. She was in the "high risk" category until the doctors realized the chemo triggered a rare kidney disorder. Once that was treated, the chemo started to work.

I've observed some issues with her memory and cognition, but I'm happy she's alive and optimistic that she'll learn to work around the challenges.

On absenteeism: So that's a minimum. Which comes out to 18 days most commonly. And what's happening is that a huge % of kids in various places are missing substantially more than that. If 50%+ of the kids at a school are missing 18+ days ... It's kind of wild IMO. It's on my list of things that I suspect is basically socioeconomically bimodal.

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