September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and each year, 15,000 kids in the United States are diagnosed.
At 10 years old, Greta Erskine is cancer-free less than a year after she was first diagnosed.
For Erskine, it started with a pain in her leg that she and her family first suspected could’ve been related to a soccer injury last December. But instead of getting better, it got worse.
“We went to a doctor, got x-rays, and they found kind of like a lump on my femur,” said Erskine.
After more tests and a biopsy, doctors at Corewell Health diagnosed Erskine with osteosarcoma cancer, a bone cancer.
In the beginning, she says there was a lot of crying.
“My mood shifted down because I was like, ‘I got cancer,’” Erskine said. “The worst thing I could get was cancer, and I got it, and it was really hard to understand that I’m going to have to go in and out of the hospital pumped with fluids and chemos to get better.”
Dr. Kaydee Kaiser helped Erskine and her family understand the diagnosis and treatment, which, for her, meant amputating her leg.
“Most kids, I think, would find that as a difficult undertaking to go through, but Greta, Greta just after the surgery, actually thrived and embraced losing this icky leg that she called it,” said Kaiser.
Erskine, who turned to her favorite pastime of making and art, impressed the doctors and nurses who cared for her.
She kept a sense of humor, creating and inspiring everyone around her.
“Even when we were in the depths of these heavy things, we would still laugh,” said dad, Alex Erskine, who was not at all surprised to see others draw inspiration from his daughter.
He describes Erskine’s cancer diagnosis as “the world’s biggest lesson of being courageous and sticking together.”
Of all the drawings she made and shared with Local 4, one stood out among the rest.
It was a drawing of her hand with the words “Do Art, Finish Chemo.” To Erskine, those words mean “be creative and finish hard times.”
Before leaving the hospital for her final chemotherapy treatment this summer, she had the message made into t-shirts for all the doctors and nurses who helped care for her.
But they aren’t the only ones she’s thinking about. Erskine had a message for any other kid dealing with a cancer diagnosis.
“It’s going to stop one day,” Erskine said. “You’re going to feel better one day. It’s not the end of the world yet & you can do this!”