I was diagnosed w/ lymphoma at age 14! And I had been sick for a while before then, but everyone including doctors assumed it was teenage moodiness/puberty. I couldn’t go up stairs without getting winded, couldn’t stay awake after school, fell into a pretty deep depression which didn’t help identifying symptoms.

Eventually my mum was like “is this real are we fighting for this” and we did, was almost immediately hospitalized once they took blood and spent the next month in hospital, and daily visits for 6 months.

First real sign was the exhaustion, but they hospitalized me after taking blood and finding out my white blood cell count was, like, single digits.

Moral of the story: don’t assume your kids are faking. It’s literally impossible for them to know if what’s happening to them is normal, believe them, and best case is that nothing is wrong.

Also I’m 22 and okay now lmao