Childhood cancer: how to protect their childhood
The lipstick in the infusion chair
“A cancer diagnosis comes with a plan for your body. It does not come with a plan for the person inside the body: their joy, their identity, their sense of still being themselves.”
Somewhere in my treatment, a group came through the infusion center handing out cosmetics. The idea was small and a little funny: put on some lipstick, feel a bit more like yourself. I remember it because of how out of place it seemed against the IV lines, and because it worked. For a minute I was a woman choosing a color, not a patient receiving a drip.
I’ve thought about that minute a lot since talking with Kylee McGrane-Zarnoch, who founded A Moment of Magic (amomentofmagic.org) after a hospital hallway taught her the same thing. A cancer diagnosis comes with a plan for your body. It does not come with a plan for you: your joy, identity, sense of still being yourself. The oncology team will not write that plan. So if you are the patient, or the parent, you are the one who has to. You are, to borrow the frame I keep coming back to, the CEO of this. And the CEO doesn’t only manage treatment. She manages morale.
To do manage morale through treatment, I had to protect joy, and preserve my identity even as it evolved. Science shows that morale management matters for treatment efficacy and outcomes.
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Joy is Not the Consolation Prize
We talk about joy in cancer like a garnish. The research treats it more seriously than that. A 2025 review of psychological care in pediatric oncology found that play-based interventions reduce anxiety and stress in hospitalized children and measurably strengthen their coping, which is why “play specialist” is an actual clinical role and not a nice-to-have. Kylee’s bubbles trick is this exact principle in a dollar-store package: a three-year-old can’t follow “take a deep breath to calm down,” but they can blow a bubble, and now they’ve done the thing.
