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Childhood Cancer Risk Cut by Prenatal Multivitamins

February 21, 2007 

Researchers at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) have found that taking prenatal multivitamins containing folic acid can reduce the risk of three common childhood cancers: leukemia, brain tumours and neuroblastoma. This research was published online on February 21, 2007, in the journal Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics. 

“Our research indicates that a large proportion of several early childhood cancers can be prevented by taking a prenatal multivitamin before and during pregnancy,” said Dr. Gideon Koren, the study’s principal investigator, director of the Motherisk Program at SickKids, a senior scientist in the SickKids Research Institute and a professor of Paediatrics, Pharmacology, Pharmacy and Medicine and Medical Genetics at the University of Toronto. “This affordable approach could contribute to a significant reduction in the number of childhood cancer cases diagnosed each year, which has huge implications for society at large.” 

The study examined the findings of seven articles that met the inclusion criteria of the authors and found that prenatal supplementation of multivitamins containing folic acid is associated with a 47 per cent protective effect for neuroblastoma, 39 per cent for leukemia and 27 per cent for brain tumours. While other studies have investigated the effect of prenatal vitamins on rates of pediatric tumours, this is the first systematic review and meta-analysis of prenatal multivitamin use before and during early pregnancy and its protective effect for several cancers in children. "This is the real deal," said POGO’s President and head of the division of hematology-oncology at McMaster Children's Hospital in Hamilton, Dr. Ronnie Barr. “This research should really get you thinking about the importance of good nutritional habits early in life -- even before birth. You really can't stress too much how important this is to good health." 

An earlier POGO-funded study, carried out in partnership with Dr. Koren and SickKids hospital, examined the impact of folic acid supplementation of flour on the incidence of neuroblastoma in Ontario. The results of the study clearly identified a decrease in the incidence of this particular cancer following the introduction of folic acid supplementation. Neuroblastoma is the commonest form of cancer in infancy. This has significant implications for the possible prevention of other cancers which are thought to develop in utero (before birth), such as some forms of leukemia. The POGO-funded study was one of the seven examined in the recent SickKids project, and contributed to the final conclusions. 

For more information on this study go to http://www.sickkids.ca/mediaroom/custom/multivitaminmotherisk07.asp

 

 

 

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Long-time Force at Onex Steps Down

January, 2006 

MADHAVI ACHARYA-TOM YEW
Business Reporter
Reprinted with permission of Torstar Syndication Services


Anthony Melman, one of the powerful forces at Gerry Schwartz's side through some of Canada's major corporate deals, is leaving Onex Corp after more than two decades.

Melman, 58, will continue to work for Onex as special adviser of strategic acquisitions, the company said in a release yesterday.

“Tony has been my partner 22 years and has made an enormous contribution to Onex's successes,” chairman and chief executive Gerry Schwartz said in a release.

“I thank him for this and for his outstanding commitment and dedication to our company.”

Prior to joining Onex in 1984 as managing director, Melman was a senior vice-president of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. 

“I am truly thankful to Gerry for giving me the opportunity to help him build Onex into the great company that it is today,” Melman said in a release. 

“I take immense pride in what we have accomplished. The experience has been exceptional and I have thoroughly enjoyed working with Gerry and the rest of the team of highly talented professionals at Onex.” 

At Onex, Melman was part of a team of executives that orchestrated giant takeover offers, not all successful, for dairy company Beatrice Canada in 1987, Sky Chefs Inc., Labatt, Cineplex Galaxy and Air Canada. Recent Onex acquisitions include Spirit AeroSystems, and ambulance operators Emergency Medical Services. 

Melman is best known for heading Onex’s crucial $750 million purchase of electronics maker Celestica Inc., then the manufacturing arm of IBM Corp. 

According to Onex’s website, Melman saw the opportunity at Celestica two years prior to the 1996 acquisition, and since that time has worked closely with the company’s management. 

He will continue in his post as a director of Celestica. 

Melman, who is known for his devotion to charitable causes, is a director of the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care and the Baycrest Centre Foundation. 

Melman serves as chair of fundraising for the Pediatric Oncology Group of Ontario, known as POGO, an organization that helps co-ordinate care and research into childhood cancer in Ontario. 

Melman became an ardent supporter of the group following his eldest daughter’s struggle with Hodgkin’s disease. 

“There’s an intensity about him that sort of comes together with complex challenges. I think that’s one of the things he savours,” said Corin Greenberg, executive director of POGO. 

“And when he gets involved, it’s very whole-hearted.”

 

Curriculum vitae

ANTHONY MELMAN

AGE:

  • 58

EDUCATION:

  • University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, PhD, Finance
  • University of Cape Town, MBA
  • University of Witwatersrand, Bachelor’s Degree, Chemical Engineering

EMPLOYMENT:

  • 1984-present: Onex Corp., managing director
  • 1977-1984: Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, VP

BOARD MEMBERSHIPS:

  • Present: University of Toronto Asset Management Corp.
  • 1996-present: Celistica Inc.
  • 1992-1998: Prosource Inc.

OTHER MEMBERSHIPS:

  • Chairman, fundraising, Pediatric Oncology Group of Ontario
  • Board member, Baycrest Centre Foundation
  • Board member, Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care

Source: Bloomberg

Brief history

ONEX CORP.

The following is a chronology of Onex’s formative years and some ambitious deals, including its failed bid for Air Canada:

  • 1983: Gerald Schwartz forms Onex as a private company.
  • February 1984: Onex acquires $50 million in capital from nine shareholders, including Canada Development Corp. and the Toronto Dominion Bank.
  • November 1984: Schwartz and his partners pay $253 million for the Canadian wing of American Can.
  • April 1987: Onex raises $246 million on its first public share offering.
  • 1995: Unsuccessful attempt to buy John Labatt Ltd. The brewing giant fought off Onex’s unsolicited $2.3 billion takeover bid, eventually selling to Belgian brewer Inter- brew for $2.7 billion.
  • 1996: Onex buys Celestica Inc. from IBM Canada Ltd. in a $750 million deal.
  • Aug. 24, 1999: Onex announces a $5.7 billion proposal to buy and merge Canada’s two leading airline carriers, Air Canada and Canadian Airlines.
  • November 1999: A Quebec court declares the Onex bid for Air Canada illegal under rules that prevent any person, alone or with “association,” to own, hold or control, directly or indirectly, more than 10 per cent of the votes that may be cast for the election of the directors of Air Canada.

Compiled by Peggy Mackenzie /
Star Library
Sources: Star files

 

 

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“Your kid has cancer. You’re broke. Now what?”

July 9th, 2006 - by Lisa Priest
Reproduced with permission from the Globe and Mail

Along with everything else, families of kids with cancer face financial hardship. Now a fund to help them is in danger too.

Linda Bernier remortgaged her home, put everything on credit cards and, at one point, lost her job after her daughter was diagnosed with a form of childhood cancer.

“There was always the risk that we could lose her at any time,” Ms. Bernier says of her daughter, Kim Oswick, who was diagnosed with a form of leukemia at the age of 8. “And to have the financial burden on top of that is really incredible.”

What Ms. Bernier didn’t realize until shortly after her daughter was diagnosed were the hidden costs childhood-cancer treatment: They included accommodation and meals for out-of-town treatment, not to mention hospital parking and costly medications that weren’t covered. For others, it can also include babysitting costs for siblings.

Ms. Bernier drew on the Pediatric Oncology Financial Assistance Program, which is run by the Pediatric Oncology Group of Ontario, a group founded by childhood cancer doctors.

She drew $2,000 to $3,000 from the program fund to offset food and accommodation costs.

The fund provides money to 1200 patients annually whose children are being treated for cancer in Ontario hospitals; half of the fund is used for those whose kids are treated at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children.

But its funding agreement with the Canadian Cancer Society, which funds $180,000 of it annually, ends in March, 2006.

The Ontario Health Ministry allowed the Pediatric Oncology Group of Ontario to spend $320,000 it had in unused funds each year for the past two years for the program, but this money is also coming to an end.

If one thing is certain, it is this: Despite a universal health-care system, the hidden costs of childhood cancer are estimated to consume at least one-third of the average family’s after-tax income. The Berniers estimate it cost $65,000 in lost income, parking and medications.

In Ontario alone, the hidden costs linked with childhood cancer are pegged at $10-million annually, according to Dr. Ronald Barr, who did a study on the subject.

There is a big burden on the families of newly diagnosed children with cancer, despite our much-vaunted health-care system,” says Dr. Barr, who is also president of the Pediatric Oncology Group of Ontario’s board. “These families face big challenges in employment, added travel costs and the costs of caring for kids with additional needs.”

Faced with treatments that can last as long as 2 ½ years, many mothers take leaves from their jobs to care for the sick child. Others aren’t as fortunate; Ms. Bernier lost her job as an office manager at an Ottawa company.

She eventually landed another job in another company that allowed her to take time off when her daughter received lengthy treatment for acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a cancer of the white blood cells, which normally fight infections. That treatment lasted 2 ½ years or until 2003, then Kim relapsed in November of the same year, precipitating another found of chemotherapy.

Last summer, Kim underwent a bone-marrow transplant that necessitated a nine-week admission to the Hospital for Sick Children. Almost one year later, Kim is 13 and healthy, having recovered from the disease.

For Ms. Bernier’s family of four, which includes another daughter, Shauna, and husband, Rick Oswick, it meant squeezing every penny. Their friends and family chipping in as well as the program fund all helped to offset some costs.

While the fund doesn’t come anywhere close to reimbursing parents for their real costs, it does ease some of their financial pain: It funds up to 160 hours of babysitting, $10 a day for parent meals when the child is in the hospital, and $5 a day if the child is an outpatient.

As well, it pays the $20 a day for Ronald McDonald House, which heavily subsidizes accommodation for parents who travel with their children for out-of-town cancer treatment.

Bill Frid, the Pediatric Oncology Family Assistance Program’s administrator, says he has been given no indication the program will receive any money from the cancer society after March, 2006, which means that the $500,000 a year has to be raised through the community. And so there has been a sailing regatta, a gala and a barbecue to raise funds.

The easiest fix we can give to parents is money,” Mr. Frid says. “We’re not making anybody rich.”

Dave Doig, Canadian Cancer Society’s senior manager for community services, says the society is not ending the program but is working to ensure that it is continued in some way after March, 2006, adding that “we need to discuss if we’re going to continue a partnership and evaluate whether this was the best way to administer the money.”

The society, he stresses, is still committed to assisting families whose children have cancer.

Whatever the case, Mark Greenberg, medical director for the Pediatric Oncology Group of Ontario, says fundraising efforts are going well, though he says they are only “scratching the surface” to help offset some of the costs these families face.

“We’d sure like to do better than we’re doing,” Dr. Greenberg says. “The amount we’re able to give each family is a token.”

Claire O’Halloran, a Hamilton-based community cancer nurse with Interlink, says the disease often strikes young children whose young parents are just starting out in life. Many have mortgage and car payments to make.

“They don’t even have a bit of a nest egg,” Ms. O’Halloran says. “Some parents have to leave work because the demands of treatment. Who can afford a cut in pay like that?”

Jill Daugherty, 34, was in graduate school and working as a geological engineer in Kingston when the youngest of her two children developed a brain tumour at the age of 2 ½. Her husband, Brian, works as a chef for the military.

“He got sick very, very quickly over the course of a day,” Ms. Daugherty says of her son, Eric, who had emergency surgery in Kingston, followed by a year of chemotherapy.

“It’s unbelievable how all the costs add up. You don’t think of the meals you eat out, toothbrushes you have to buy.”

She estimates that she spent thousands on babysitting costs alone.

And she may be shelling out again when her son finds a match for a bone-marrow transplant, which will necessitate a lengthy treatment in Toronto’s Sick Kids.

Ms. Bernier and her family says the fund allowed her to keep her home.

“Our house is falling apart, but at least we still have one. We are one of the fortunate ones.”

 

 

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"Collector strikes chord for cancer with auction of prized guitars"

December 20th, 2004 - by Gordon Pitts
Reproduced with permission from the Globe and Mail

Tony Melman, corporate buyout strategist, has a secret life. The public Mr. Melman collects undervalued companies as a kingpin in financier Gerald Schwartz’s investment team at Onex Corp. Privately, he’s into another kind of collecting that’s close to his rock-‘n’-roll axemen. But for Mr. Melman, it is much more, a fragment of his youth, a model type by Hank Marvin, legendary lead guitarist for the Shadows, a British group of the fifties and sixties.

“My personal guitar hero was Hank Martin,” says Mr. Melman, the wealthy 57-year-old dealmaker who, at his core, is still a teenaged rock guitarist growing up in Joannesburg.

That ancient, unscarred Stratocaster is a foundation piece in one of the world’s largest guitar collections, which Mr. Melman calls the Roots of Rock, reflecting the grand design behind his purchases. The 260 vintage guitars and 50 amplifiers, mostly collected over the past decade, have been appraised at almost $4-million.

But this story goes beyond the boys-and-toys theme. Mr. Melman, an Onex managing director, has given away the vast bulk of his collection for charity. Last week, it went on the block in an auction to help fight childhood cancer.

The seeds of this decision lie in Mr. Melman’s third passion, along with deals and guitars: his family. The oldest of his three children, Vanessa, is a survivor of Hodgkin’s disease, which was diagnosed at age 13. Now 33 and the mother of two, she is managing director of development and strategy for the Pediatric Oncology Group of Ontario (POGO).

Funds from the auction will flow to a POGO endowment to support care, research and education for children with cancer. The first two days of the sale raised $1.3-million, with one buyer paying $700,000 for a number of items. The auction, which is described at www.therootsofrock.com, will run indefinitely to maximize proceeds, Mr. Melman says.

He says the decision to give away his prized collection came in a “bolt of lighting” with the birth of Vanessa’s first child Noah, now 5. He figured it was easy for an affluent person to give money away, as he had in helping establish POGO. “The real test of commitment is to give away something you love for something more meaningful than the material pleasure.”

The material things he cherished included the guitars and amps strewn around his Toronto basement. It was worth giving them away, he concluded, if it meant helping even one other family with a cancer-stricken child. “He has this reputation as a tough SOB and a brilliant businessman, but at home he’s very sentimental,” says Vanessa Yakobson, his daughter. But Mr. Melman also throws himself into the pursuit of the moment. In collecting guitars, “the thrill of the chase had come to an end,” his daughter says.

And what a chase it was. Mr. Melman tracked down guitars at trade shows, in shops and from private collections around North America, using a team of expert bird dogs. Not for him the battered guitars owned by legends such as Chuck Berry or Eric Clapton, whose distinctive Fender Strat was auctioned this year for almost $1-million.

Mr. Melman has aimed for mint-quality specimens, such as a Chuck Berry portfolio based on the Gibson 350 variations used by the rock pioneer through his career. “In some areas, it is one of the finest collections in the world,” says Ray Kopko, store manager of Cosmo Music in Richmond Hill, Ont., and one of Mr. Melman’s scouts. Mr. Kopko admires particularly the blond Gibson, Fender sunburst and Gretsch guitars, as well as the white Fender amplifiers.

Mr. Melman says he takes care of what he owns, a trait that stems from the hard work he has put into affording the finer things. He never liked Jimi Hendrix because the U.S. rock guitarist burned Fender Strats on stage, and he hated the Who’s anarchic smashing of guitars.

This coddling of guitars began as a kid, when he started a band at the strict Methodist boarding school he attended in South Africa. At 16, Mr. Melman met his wife, Valerie, at a band gig – she was dating the drummer – and they married in 1969. Mr. Melman, an engineering graduate with a finance PhD, then sold all his guitars except a beloved Epiphone Casino.

The Melmans moved to Canada, where he built a career in banking and among the buyout boffins assembled by Mr. Schwartz. But he continued to play guitar and compose, and he led an Onex rock band to celebrate the purchase of Celestica Inc. in 1996. By the mid-1990s, he clearly has the means to collect vintage guitars, and in his obsessive fashion, started to track down the iconic objects of his youth.

In many ways, it was similar to his search for acquisitions. When Onex buys a company, he says, it is looking for ways to maximize value – through expanding the business, vertical integration or industry consolidation. So when he looked at his collection, he was asking: “What do I want this to become?” Replicating the roots of rock was like researching an industry, he says. It meant choosing a particular guitar over alternative investments, pouncing on rare items and negotiating.

In pushing his agents to get the best specimens and prices, “he tried to get people to go to their limits,” Mr. Kopko says. Mr. Melman paid close to the appraised value for his total collection, but some guitars have appreciated nicely. A 1958 Gibson Les Paul gold-top, bought in the late 1990s for $35,000, sold last week for $100,000. The 1954 Stratocaster is up 20 per cent since 1999.

The hope was that the auction would yield $5-million Canadian, but final proceeds are much affected by foreign-exchange markets, because bids are in U.S. dollars. Although the bulk of his collection is gone, the music has not stopped for Mr. Melman. He still owns more than 15 guitars. He contributed his boyhood Epiphone to the endowment, but couldn’t stand to part with it, so he bought it back. “When you look at that guitar, there is not a scratch on it,” he says proudly.

 

 

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"Killer Cure"

July 19th, 2003 - by Lisa Priest

Keeping stricken children alive is one of medical science’s great victories in the war on cancer. But there’s a problem, Lisa Priest reports. The heavy weapons needed to defeat the disease are causing serious side effects, even decades after the fact. Doctors are determined to spare today’s child victims a similar fate.

By Lisa Priest

They thought they had a drunk on their hands. It was a scorching summer day when the two cops spotted Andrew Sprawson staggering down Trafalgar Road in Oakville, Ont. His arms were flailing so much that he looked like he was trying to do the breaststroke.

Pulling alongside, the officers, both women, asked if he needed any help. No, replied Mr. Sprawson, explaining that treatment he had undergone as a child to fight off brain cancer had left him with a bit of a problem in keeping his balance.

He speech was slightly slurred, but he spoke in a slow, deliberate manner, and didn’t smell of liquor, so the police didn’t doubt his word. They also couldn’t help but notice beneath his thin blond hair the mark on his skull left by a brain biopsy.

Declining their offer of a ride, Mr. Sprawson slowly made his way to his apartment, at times grasping at buildings for support. It was 1992 and he was just 29, but he looked far older – and despite his assurances to the police, his life wasn’t going all that well.

With his keen eye for design, Mr. Sprawson had built a business from designing and installing playground sets and dollhouses for children. His work consumed 12 to 16 hours a day and was his salvation, but it also made for a startlingly lonely existence: Evenings consisted of a hastily thrown together meal eaten in front of the television. But loneliness wasn’t his only problem.

During the day, Gillian Sprawson worked with her son, digging the holes he couldn’t. She noticed how his stamina was fading, how he increasingly struggled to hold the electric drill steady and swayed while pushing wood through a high powered table saw.

“I’m pretty sure he knew,” she says, “but he didn’t want to face it.”

Even though it was many years after the fact, Mr. Sprawson was suffering from the side effects of his cancer treatment.

Yes he had always had some balance problems, but they were never this severe, nor was his loss of motor control and hearing.

Then one day he fell to the floor and gashed his forehead. Before long, he was calling his mother to admit that it was time to go to the hospital.

Determining the exact cause of his balance problem would require much medical detective work, but one thing was clear: The cure for his childhood cancer had come at a heavy price.

In the 1960s, a diagnosis of cancer was a death sentence for most youngsters. Fewer than one-third of those under 15 were still alive five years after starting treatment. Today, the marvels of modern medicine have increased the survival rate to 75 per cent.

More than three decades after then-U.S. president Richard Nixon declared war on cancer, many point to progress in this field as evidence that victory over the great killer is just around the corner.

By 2010, it is estimated that as many as one in every 400 North Americans between 15 and 45 will have had cancer as children. Their survival will stand as a testament to the effectiveness of the radiation, chemotherapy and surgery that have been used on young patients with great success since the 1970s.

But the story doesn’t end there. Cancer physicians have tracked these children and discovered something sobering: At least 40 per cent and perhaps as many as 65 per cent of all children who survived cancer in the 1970s and 1980s will pay a price for that cure.

“Cure isn’t perfection for a lot of these kids,” says Ronald Barr, chief of the hematology-oncology service at the Children’s Hospital at Hamilton Health Sciences Corporation. “We’re learning that lesson more and more as the years go by.”

Many people don’t even realize they’re at risk. After being treated, they have gone on with their lives, thinking they were out of the woods and losing contact with the doctors who treated their cancer. They have returned to the care of family physicians, often unaware of the telltale signs when something goes wrong.

Now, says Lesley Collins, clinical program co-ordinator for the Pediatric Oncology Group of Ontario, former patients “need to be in touch with someone who knew what their treatments were. We’re trying to get into the community to let them know of the advantages for follow up.”

But this is not an easy feat. Charles Sklar, a U.S. cancer specialist, has found that, no matter how hard you look for patients like this, at least 15 per cent of them won’t be found.

“It is difficult for people who have been through cancer treatment to come to the realization that they still need to be very vigilant,” says Dr. Sklar, director of the pediatric follow-up program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

However, he warns “they just can’t close the door on the whole thing and say, ‘I’m fine.’”

Clearly, a great many of them are not fine. Researchers have uncovered a litany of delayed reactions to treatments, some of which have been discontinued.

For example, women given chest radiation as children to fend off Hodgkin’s disease should undergo regular breast screening because they have a significantly higher risk of developing breast cancer later in life.

And children treated with chemotherapy drugs known as anthracyclines could encounter heart problems that may not show up for 15 years. For reasons not well understood, the drugs damage the cells of the heart muscle, and can, over time lead to cardiomyopathy, a thinning of the outside wall or muscle of the left ventricle. As many as half of all patients will suffer some damage, which can be aggravated by heavy lifting and even pregnancy.

Bleomycin, used to treat lymphomas, can have a long-term toxic impact on the lungs, while prednisone, a steroid often used against leukemia, can lead to bone loss. Alkylating durgs can damage the gonads in men and increase the risk of early menopause amount women who were given high doses. And cisplatin, used in bone, brain and other tumours, can cause hearing loss and kidney problems.

Now that medical scientists realize just how severe the consequences of their treatment can be, “the push is to reduce those consequences,” says Mark Greenberg, medical director of the Pediatric Oncology Group of Ontario, a non-profit organization that represents pediatric programs that treat cancer.

Dr. Greenberg, senior staff oncologist and director of the after-care program at the Toronto-based Hospital for Sick Children, has taken part in a study tracking 14,000 North American patients, including 1,100 in Ontario, treated for childhood cancer from 1970 to 1986.

Their research shows that certain types of cancers and their treatment are more likely to spell trouble, including renewed cancer, later on. The risk is higher for people who had brain tumours as children, followed by bone tumours and Hodgkin’s disease, where cells in the lymphatic system become abnormal by dividing too rapidly and growing without any order or control. (The lowest risk is for Wilms tumour, a form of kidney cancer, non-Hodgkins’s lymphoma and low-risk leukemias.)

So, five years down the road, patients whose brain tumours were treated with surgery, radiation and sometimes chemotherapy have a higher risk of developing endocrine and cardiovascular diseases, including hypothyroidism, growth-hormone deficiency, osteoporosis, stroke and blood clots.

To make matters worse, many also live alone or are still at home with their parents, unable to make friends or find rewarding work. The empathy and showering on them as children evaporated when they entered adult society; now they are seen as nothing more than oddities.

“Some brain-tumour kids rate their health status as worse than death, and that’s clearly a tragedy,” Hamilton’s Dr. Barr says. “As an entire group, they are the worst affected.”
Andrew Sprawson is now 40 and, three decades after the fight with brain cancer, his speech is still slurred, he has difficulty keeping his balance and remembering things, and suffers from hearing loss and cataracts. He also has on occasion the bizarre sensation that bolts of electricity are going off in his brain. Even simple things, such as bathing and getting dressed in the morning involve intense concentration, effort and time.

Yet, he has achieved a certain peace and says his quality of life is high.

“With one swing, the sword cuts the cancer from our bodies for which we are all truly grateful,” he wrote in one essay for Rebounders, a support group for survivors of childhood cancer. “But the sword comes back like a swinging pendulum, striking a survivor with long-term physical and mental effects.”

His mother, now 63, admits that “sometimes it’s heartbreaking to see how hard it is for him to get things done, but he does it,” even though “it takes him four times as long as anyone else.”

The Toronto specialists who initially saw Mr. Sprawson a decade ago were at a loss to find a treatment for his severe imbalance and hearing problems. “They threw up their hands,” he recalls. “I was pretty devastated. I always figured I would get married, have a family. But the doctors basically waved goodbye to me.”

In his darkest moments, he became suicidal. Not only was his condition getting worse, his business was in debt. Maybe if he killed himself and made it look like an accident, he thought, his parents could use the insurance money to erase the deficit.

His mother realized the depth of his dispair one Sunday at church when so looked over to see him sobbing uncontrollably in the pew. “He told me he didn’t want to live. He said ‘There’s no point, I can’t do this, I’m useless, no one can employ me.’

“It’s painful to watch your child suffer emotionally.”

That day, Mrs. Sprawson requested that her Anglican minister speak to Andrew right away, only to be asked to make an appointment for the following Monday. Appalled, the Sprawsons left the church and eventually joined an evangelical Baptist congregation, which has embraced Andrew and prayed for his health.

About that time, Mrs. Sprawson was talking to a physiotherapist who suggested a neurologist named Robert Duke might be able to help.

“The initial assumption was that this was the effect of radiation to the brain that saved his life and may have knocked off a number of neurons and reduced his reserve capacity,” says Dr. Duke, head of neurology at Hamilton Health Sciences Corporation.

What other doctors couldn’t see on a CT Scan (basically, an X-ray of the brain), Dr. Duke quickly found thanks to magnetic resonance imaging scanner. The MRI uses strong magnets and pulses of radio waves to manipulate the natural magnetic properties in the body. Unlike the CT scan, it can detect small, subtle changes in tissue.

Dr. Duke determined that Mr. Sprawson was suffering from a strong iron deposition over the brain. Usually, that’s a sign of blood having leaked into the spinal fluid, but Mr. Sprawson reported nothing, such as sudden severe headaches, that could support this finding.

By coincidence, another patient in Oakville had the same problem, and Dr. Duke tracked down the neurologist in that case to compare notes. Eventually, he diagnosed Mr. Sprawson as suffering from superficial siderosis, a very rare condition that occurs when a layer or hemosiderin (produced when blood is broken down in the body) contains iron, which is toxic and can damage nerve cells. In medical shorthand, hid condition was a form of iron poisoning.

And so Mr. Sprawson was operated on again in 1993. A hole was made in the third ventricle, one of the cavities of the brain filled with spinal fluid. A neurosurgeon blocked the shunt, inserted two decades earlier to drain excess fluid. He then created a new opening, a hole essentially to flush out the area where bleeding was occurring.

“That seems to have stopped it from getting worse but some damage was done for sure,” Dr. Duke says. “I haven’t seen another case like that since. I suspect this problem doesn’t show up for many years.”

Without the surgery, Mr. Sprawson would have “deteriorated further in terms of his walking. It can cause profound deafness,” Dr. Duke explains. “I feel really good we’ve been able to help Andrew.”

Nikki Buckborough’s story is no less dramatic. She was just 21/2 when his mother Diane noticed she was bruising easily and developing odd-looking red blood blisters. The diagnosis was acute lymphoblastic leukemia, which involves unregulated growth of immature white blood cells known as lymphoblasts. The most common malignancy of childhood, it represents nearly one-third of all pediatric cancers.

Today, Ms. Buckborough is 17 and excels at mathematics; a perfect test score hangs on the refrigerator of her home, north of Simcoe. She is talented at piano and amazes her parents with her quickness of mind and wit.

Yet she cannot breath without a respirator, needs an electric wheelchair to get around and attends a school for the blind in Brantford. Her lungs must be suctioned at least 10 times a day.

Her condition is a bit of a mystery. Childhood leukemia patients rarely have problems like hers later on.

I don’t think anybody really knows what the event was but the best guess – and it really remains a guess – is that she had some form of viral infection that attacked her nervous system and resulted in her having the problems you’ve seen,” Dr. Barr says.

But cancer wasn’t through with the Buckboroughs. Several years later, a second daughter, Aimee, then 13, was falling asleep in class and complaining of chronic pain. Her mother took her to the doctor’s and insisted on a chest X-ray. She was rushed to hospital and the diagnosis was late-stage non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Today, Aimee Buckborough is being tracked for two reasons. She is part of an attempt to determine whether cancer or its treatment causes some patients to develop osteoporosis years later. She is also being seen by doctors because she took daunomycin, another anthracycline drugs, which keep people alive but can weaken the heart.

“Both of my kids are considered cured,” Mrs. Buckborough says. “I have two other children, but I can’t imagine my life without them. I’m so glad they’re still here.”

It has been 13 years since chemotherapy, surgery and radiation helped Nelson Mota fend ofd Hodgkin’s disease. Now he’s engaged to be married and says: “I feel very lucky…but fearful, too. You never know what’s going to pop up in life.”

He was 15 and writing a Grade 10 math exam when he noticed a lump on his neck. Right afterward, he headed for the doctor’s office: his brother, Mario, had had the same symptom years earlier when he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease.

Mr. Mota received 27 rounds of radiation to the chest, abdomen and groin, as well as having his spleen removed. Then, two years later, a CT scan revealed that the cancer had returned, which led to a year of chemotherapy before he was out of the woods.

“It’s a different life,” the Hamilton resident now says. “You don’t do the things other children do.”

The chemotherapy included the anti-cancer agent bleomycin, which helped to rid his system of the disease but can cause lung problems, as well as adriamycin, which can weaken the heart. As a result, Mr. Mota takes part in a special tracking program that calls for a rigorous physical exam every year during which both his heart and lungs are carefully scrutinized. So far, doctors have found only a slight reduction in his lung capacity, which he says has not affected his daily life.

Still, he remains vigilant. “Here I am years later and I’m fine. I have the perfect life, a great job, a home and I’m getting married in a few months. But there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about it.”

Toronto resident Vanessa Melman Yakobson is in much the same boat: no sign of trouble and hoping it stays that way. Now 31, she was 13 when she too found a lump on her neck that a biopsy revealed to be an early stage of Hodgkin’s disease. She underwent chemotherapy for six months, taking eight different drugs including bleomycin, but didn’t need radiation.

“Right now, I have zero effects,” she says. “And I thank God for that. But I do take stock of my life. I ask, ‘Am I as happy as I could be? Am I satisfied that I am spending enough time with my friends and my family?’”

Doctors, meanwhile, are striving to take stock of just what has been happening to people such as Ms. Yakobson after fighting off their cancer. They are determined to tailor the treatment that today’s children receive, potentially reducing their problems in the long term.

They now know that the radiation dose given to patients with medulloblastoma, a form of brain cancer, can be reduced by about one-third, says Dr. Greenberg of the Hospital for Sick Children. It’s too soon to say for sure, he says, but “at first blush, there’s some suggestion that the side effects have been reduced.”

Bleomycin also is being administered in smaller doses. And Dr. Greenberg says that, “within each cancer, there may be identifiable groups at less risk.” For example, some forms of childhood leukemia are less risky than others, allowing doctors to alter their approach.

“Treatments have changed,” he says, but adds that it’s still too soon to know just how well today’s child patients will fare. Which is why cancer doctors still want to find the thousands of missing patients from the seventies and eighties and start tracking them.

“The whole point,” he says, “is to alter the outcomes for today’s kids and tomorrow’s kids.”

As for Andrew Sprawson, he is profoundly content despite his uncertain future. In fact, his attitude is, if anything, inspirational – he has achieved a depth of happiness that many would envy. He realizes what fighting cancer has done to him, but he can’t ignore the fact that, without the treatment, he would have died,

Once Dr. Duke was through with him in 1993, he felt better than he had for years. His parents and brother Jonathan paid off his business debts and he tried to get back into the swing of life, romance included.

“He always fell for the best-looking girl, and always the one, who wasn’t going to look at him twice,” his mother recalls. “The girls would sit and have lunch with him, but if he asked anybody out, they’d sort of laugh at him.”

Finally, he met someone who not only didn’t laugh at him but knew just what he was going through. Most people who survive childhood brain tumours “are alone,” Jill Sprawson says. “Even when they find another person, it’s very difficult for them because the other person doesn’t understand what they’re going through.”

She met her future husband at a Rebounders meeting because she, too, had battled medulloblastoma, a fast-growing tumour that appeared at the base of her brain when she was just 7. They married in 1997 after a two-year courtship, during which she completed her bachelor of arts degree in sociology.

They and their sons, Spencer,4, and Pete, 2, now live on disability allowance in a comfortable, two-storey Oakville home, a large part of which was paid for by Mr. Sprawson’s brother.

“The two of us make one person,” says Mrs. Sprawson, 28. “Babies are wonderful and how they look at us is wonderful…”

“But one day it will sink in. Spencer already asks why daddy can’t run.”

 

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"Daughter and dad fight to beat cancer"

April 25th, 2001 - by Elizabeth Church

Vanessa Yakoboson was 13 years old when she stumbled on the first signs of her cancer. “ I was in South Africa visiting my grandparents. It was New Year’s Eve. I felt a lump on my neck,” she remembers.

When she got home to Canada, she was diagnosed with Hodgkins disease, a cancer of the lymph nodes, and began chemotherapy.

“She was a beautiful young girl who suddenly came down with cancer,” says her father, Anthony Melman, a senior vice-president and partner at Toronto-based Onex Corp. and the man responsible for structuring that firm’s numerous buyout deals. “She used to lie in bed at night and imagine that she was tying the roots of her hair together so it wouldn’t fall out.”

Ms Yakobson is now 29 years old and has an MBA and a marketing job at Toronto consulting firm Digital 4Sight Corp. She is the mother of a toddler with another baby on the way.

Her cancer is gone, but the impact it had on her life and her family remains.

That experience is what has compelled both father and daughter to take a very public and personal stand to raise money for the research and treatment of childhood cancer. Their aim in the same, but their approaches are a generation apart.

For starters, Mr. Melman chose a fairly standard path for a prominent businessman. He wrote some cheques. But in the past year or so he has gone one step further – sending out personal letters to his blue-chip Bay Street colleagues recounting his own daughter’s ordeal and asking them to give.

“To be honest with you, I don’t like to ask people for money,” he says. “To be effective you have to have a personal and emotional attachment to what you do…That’s why I’ve done it.

Ms. Yakobson is focusing her efforts on planning events that will grab the attention of young professionals you are starting their careers.

“We’re capturing them at the point of entry” she explains, using the language of a marketing major. “It’s a less efficient way to do fundraising, but what we are really doing is raising awareness for the cause.”

The cause both father and daughter have chosen in the Pediatric Oncology Group of Ontario or POGO. The organization, founded in 1983, helps coordinate care and research in to childhood cancer in the province, and acts as a voice for the interests of children with cancer, their families and the individuals involved in treatment.

Both father and daughter are working to raise $4-million to fund a Chair in Childhood Cancer Control, currently held by POGo medical director Mark Greenberg at the University of Toronto. Dr. Greenberg was also Ms. Yakobson’s oncologist. So far, the fund has about $3-million.

Mr. Melman – who gets up at 4:30am to squeeze in some exercise before his workday starts – has agreed to give his time to head the fundraising efforts and use his story and his rolodex to attract large donors.

At the same time, Ms. Yakobson has started a young leadership group within the organization for the specific purposes of attracting her peers as volunteers and donors to the charity.

Last year, this group raised $30,000 for POGO through donations and a dance. Next month, it hopes to at least equal that number selling $20 tickets to the second annual Party for POGO at Toronto’s Capital Theatre on May 4.

“My father could raise that from one phone call,” concedes Ms. Yakobson during a recent interview. “But it is really important to target this community. These are young professionals who have a steady income and are making decisions about how to spend that income…we want them to remember POGO and for it to become a charity of choice.”

Gordon Floyd, vice president of public relations for the Canadian Centre for Philanthropy, says such “tiered approaches to fundraising” are becoming common practice among sophisticated charities.

Mr. Floyd says charities often talk about the “giving pyramid”. The goal of a well-designed campaign, he says, will be to move donors up that pyramid to give larger and larger amounts.

Ms. Yakobson is already thinking of ways to leverage the inroads she makes at next month’s party to hold a more lavish fundraising dinner in the fall.

“Our hope is that this will grow to be more than just one yearly event. There is the potential to raise a lot of money,” she says. “Definitely, this generation is very aware of the need to give back.”

Carolyn Ansley, a childhood friend of Ms. Yakobson’s and a member of POGO’s young leadership group, agrees that her peers are open to giving but says they need to be approached in the right way and sometimes they need to be asked more than once.

“You realize people go through stages in their lives. It’s really important to build a relationship with a group as they are growing into their peak, earning years.”

It helps, she says, if people can develop a tie to a cause. She says her own involvement in POGO is definitely linked to her experience watching her friend battle cancer. But she says other members of the group have joined because of the cause, not personal ties.

For Mr. Melman, his own experience watching his eldest child cope with cancer is what dri8ves his commitment of time and money – including special donations to support cancer research made by the family to celebrate her marriage.

“In many ways, the easiest thing to do is write the cheque because, whether someone gives $5 or $500,00, it’s the same action, the same amount of effort,” Mr. Melman says. “The difficulty is finding the time and committing the time and giving thought to it.”

POGO’s Dr. Greenberg says the work of Mr. Melman has provide the group was access to worlds that it would not normally have.

Ms. Yakobson’s ability to see her own experience in the context of broader issues provides a valuable perspective, he says.

“Both of them have moved a lot of people.”

Mr. Melman says his involvement in POGO comes out of his own personal gratitude to the doctor who saved his daughter’s life and the joy his family feels because of her survival.

“With Vanessa, every day of our lives we experience the joy,” he says. “Seeing her give back her time to POGO makes it all the more meaningful for us. It’s like I’m in awe of her involvement and her words carry such meaning because she has experience so much.”

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