Cleo Athena Theodoropulos' Fundraising Page

This image of our late daughter, Cleo Theodoropulos, perfectly captures the exuberant life of a teenager. 

Just getting her driver’s license, her future laid out for her to take. A first real taste of independent life and all of its wonderful possibilities. Then a dreadful cancer diagnosis. The promise and expectation of a future evaporate. Months on end in a cancer ward, that is the new reality.

My daughter had Ewing's Sarcoma, and she died shortly after diagnosis. Other kids will put on a protracted fight. There are limited innovative, advanced therapies for these solid tumor cancers, and the treatment regime is brutal: Chemo cocktail, surgery and radiation. The fight for daily survival is on. Truly heartbreaking.

These teens with cancer are not only physiologically damaged, but they are also devastated psychologically. Teens often feel too old for the pediatric clinic and its playroom, but too young for an adult clinic alongside people their parents’ and grandparents’ age. They can feel isolated and face a unique set of challenges in the way that cancer can disrupt their lives, change their relationships with family and peers, and affect their plans for college and career. On top of this is the fact that the types of cancers afflicting teens are biologically different than those affecting babies or adults; they are difficult to treat; and, are an underfunded area of research due to small patient population size.

Leading oncologists at Dana-Farber/Boston Children's Hospital are aiming to address many of these issues by establishing The Center for Adolescent & Young Adult Oncology (CAYAO), bringing together medical and psychosocial providers across Dana-Farber’s pediatric and medical oncology teams in a first-of-its-kind formalized way to provide more integrated, developmentally-appropriate care to this population.

Help me to make this Center a reality by making a contribution to the CAYAO.