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To Fully Understand the Childhood Cancer Experience, Watch this Movie
I just finished watching A Lion in the House. It is a documentary that was released in 2006 and is both an Emmy Award and a Sundance Film festival standout. It focuses on five families who each have a child battling some form of childhood cancer.
The filmmakers (Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert) also fought the disease with their own daughter and I believe that this was one key to the movie being such a success. Their narration was incredibly sensitive and clearly coming from the perspective of personal experience.
When the film was originally recommended to me, I was not emotionally prepared to watch it but I knew it would be important for me to watch someday so I purchased it. In fact, I am not even sure I was emotionally prepared to watch it today. However, my plan is to begin public speaking in October and I have begun preparing for this by attending classes and setting myself up for mini speaking engagements.
As I prepared to sit down and write my first speech today, I decided that watching the movie would be good preparation. Perhaps like an actor getting into character. You see, I tell my story every day, many times a day. I believe I have subconsciously forced myself to push my emotions down deep in order to get my business (of building Striving for More) done.
This movie helped. It rushed me back into the days when we were going through it all with Colleen. I feel every emotion now. I can write the speech and fully feel.
While I watched the movie, I was keenly aware of the depression in the children. There was one young boy that was clearly depressed. The camera zoomed in on the tears running down his face as the reality of a feeding tube which had just been placed in his nose (and having to attend middle school that way, sunk in).
The movie never showed any emotional support being given (that is not to say it was not offered). The movie focused on the parents, the children and the oncologists and did not focus on any emotional support areas provided to children with cancer (that Striving for More is working so hard to fund like psychologists, child life specialists, social workers, and pastors.)
Now that I am outside of the situation and watched this movie, it rejuvenates my passion as I watch the emotional disruption on the adolescent boys and young girls portrayed in the film. The parents were fighting for their children's lives and they too needed emotional support. There was one line in the film spoken by a hospice nurse after a young patient died after her father forced her to go back into the hospital for one last attempt at chemo against her wishes. The hospice nurse said "...prolonging a process that would damage them spiritually and psychologically.."
I strongly encourage all of you to watch this movie. September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month and most of America is unaware of what these children are go through.
The good news is that childhood cancer survival rates are rising. The bad news is that according to a 9/2008 Progress Policy Institute Report "Childhood cancer incidence overall has risen by 33 percent since Nixon's declaration (1971 declaration of a national effort against all forms of cancer); brain and other nervous-system cancers in young children have increased by over 50 percent; and the incidence of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in teenagers has more than doubled."
Most of you may already know someone who has walked this journey with their child. Perhaps a neighbor, perhaps a friend. Perhaps a colleague. Maybe it is just me, through this blog.
The interesting thing is that even those closest to Vince and I do not fully understand what it was like. This movie however, will bring them very, very close and understanding is so important to fully supporting.
{The movie is available to buy on Amazon but it is also available to rent through Netflix and through Blockbuster (not in all of the stores, however so check on the web). }
