Nurse Lupita

  • Nurse Lupita (right) and her colleague

Lupita is the lead nurse at Hospital del Nino DIF in Pachuca, central Mexico. She has over a decade of paediatric nursing experience and her commitment to her profession allows her to build relationships with her patients. 

My favourite part of being a nurse is looking after the children on the ward. There are some patients that I get to know over a long period of time and begin to feel like a member of their family. 

Despite her vast experience working as a paediatric oncology nurse, sharing the news of their child’s cancer diagnosis to parents is always difficult. 

The hardest part of my job is telling a parent that their child has cancer. Although leukaemia has become an increasingly common cancer found in young children, these are the fortunate ones as it means their cancer has been detected early enough that it is still treatable. The most difficult cases involve those children who arrive at hospital with advanced cancers.

Late diagnosis due to financial constraints or a lack of awareness of childhood cancer are barriers thousands of children encounter in low and middle-income countries. However, these are barriers that we can overcome by working collaboratively and with support from our donors. With childhood cancer survival rates as high as 80% in the developed world, we can even the odds for those in developing countries. 

Together with our partners we have delivered training to health care professionals and communities to promote awareness of the early warning signs of childhood cancer and appropriate referral pathways. You can give the gift of growing up to a child with cancer by donating today. Giving £100 could cover the cost of accurate diagnosis for five children with cancer, increasing their chances of survival.