Through Their Eyes: How KT Roland Used Her Granddaughters to Help Children Understand Multiple Myeloma
Through Their Eyes: How KT Roland Used Her Granddaughters to Help Children Understand Multiple Myeloma How do you explain multiple myeloma to a child? For adults, the disease can be difficult enough to understand. We talk about plasma cells, bone marrow, abnormal proteins, chemotherapy, stem cell transplants, remission, relapse, and countless blood tests. But a toddler doesn't need a lesson in hematology. A grade-school child, however, may be ready to understand a little more. That realization led author and multiple myeloma advocate KT Roland to approach the subject in two different ways, using her granddaughters, Amelia and Adele, to help explain Grandma's cancer at different levels of childhood understanding. The result was two children's books with one shared purpose: helping children understand what it means when someone they love is living with multiple myeloma. Starting With the Youngest Children For very young children, cancer is an abstract concept. They don't ...