When the surgery has passed and chemotherapy has ended, cancer’s toll on the body remains.
Children who want to get back to handstands and Hula Hoops can find themselves weak and discouraged.
Concerns about the physical well-being of children who’ve had cancer prompted athletic trainer Travis Gallagher to encourage Nationwide Children’s Hospital to start its Play Strong program.
“These patients, they just want to get back to being a kid,” he said.
Each child comes to the year-old program with a unique set of challenges, but the most common are muscle weakness, difficulty balancing and weight gain brought on by treatments or inactivity.
The program so far has helped about a dozen kids, Gallagher said. He and his Children’s co-workers do one-on-one work but also try to work with groups of children when possible. And they encourage siblings and friends to come along and join exercise that is well-disguised as play.
As Gallagher sees it, what he’s doing has two purposes. He’s helping children rebound and setting them on the right course for a lifestyle that promotes overall well-being and has been shown to work against future cancers.
“If they sweat while they’re here, if they smile while they’re here, and I know we’ve worked on what I wanted to, then we’re good,” he said last week before running 7-year-old Kinley Strohl and her brother, Carter, around the hospital’s Westerville sports-medicine complex for an hour. Gallagher said that working with cancer patients has changed him.
“For the first time ever, I’m picturing my kids when I’m working with a kid. Cancer is one of my biggest fears.”
He said he talks to each child about what they’d like to be able to do. Kinley, a second-grader from Ashley in Delaware County, is especially enthusiastic about gymnastics.
As she performed handspring after handspring last week and ran from one fitness-focused game to another, stopping only for quick swigs of water, it was easy to see that her strength is coming back from fighting leukemia. Understandably, sometimes parents are protective and might discourage activity, Gallagher said.
“They just want to wrap them in Bubble Wrap and hold them tight,” he said, adding that the program helps them see that their children are almost always able to participate in the activities they enjoyed before cancer.
Kinley’s mom and dad, Michelle and Ryan Strohl, have encouraged her to exercise (even though Mrs. Strohl worries over “every bump and bruise”), but getting started was a little rough after her treatment, which included chemotherapy and a bone-marrow transplant from an anonymous donor.
Kinley said she was especially eager to get back on her bike after her transplant last year. But spending more than two months in the hospital recovering from the procedure had worn away her strength.
“I was weak,” she said. “My legs weren’t strong enough.”
No longer. Kinley said she can do everything she wants. She is midway through the program.
Gallagher said every child in the program has seen improvement in balance, agility, arm and leg strength, and cardiovascular endurance. Participants start with an eight-week schedule and about half continue on for another eight weeks.
In Cleveland, Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital has a program called Kids Kicking Cancer that encourages survivors of cancer and blood disorders to be active. The program offers free clinics in basketball, soccer, golf, tennis and swimming in addition to help with dietary guidance and an at-home exercise programs.
Program coordinator Judy Weiss said that she and others at the hospital especially are interested in better understanding why a high percentage of childhood cancer survivors become obese.
“Since the treatments have gotten better and more kids are coming out on the other side of these cancers and blood disorders, there’s much more emphasis on what is their life going to look like,” she said.
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