The Poison We Call Medicine: The Brutal Truth About Chemotherapy I don’t know how many more ways to say this without screaming. But maybe it’s time I scream.
The chemotherapy didn’t save Kingston.
It tortured him.
It robbed him.
It shredded his body and mind in slow motion.
And in the end, it still didn’t keep the cancer from killing him.
So how exactly are we calling this a success?
When people hear the word “chemotherapy,” they think “treatment.” They think “hope.” They picture children with bald heads and brave smiles and IV poles decorated with stickers. What they don’t picture are the days I had to watch Kingston writhe in pain from mucositis that blistered every inch of his digestive tract, from the inside of his mouth to the lining of his rectum. They don’t picture the way his skin broke down from wiping so much blood and acid because the chemo was burning through him from both ends.
They don’t know what it’s like to be handed a folder of “supportive care resources” and told to manage it yourself when your kid can’t eat, can’t drink, and can’t stop vomiting up bile while on a feeding tube. They don’t understand that chemotherapy doesn’t “just” attack the cancer—it attacks everything growing, multiplying, or healing. That includes white blood cells. That includes bone marrow. That includes a child’s brain, heart, kidneys, ears, eyes, muscles, teeth, bones, nerves, and hormones. That includes them.
People want to believe that if your child gets cancer, there’s a plan. There’s science. There’s progress. But the truth is, we’re still throwing napalm at a forest fire and hoping it rains.
Chemotherapy drugs—like vincristine, cisplatin, methotrexate, cyclophosphamide, and etoposide—are not gentle warriors. They are systemic toxins, originally derived from mustard gas, designed to kill fast. But a child’s body is made of fast-growing cells. That’s what childhood is. Growth. Development. Formation. So when you dump poison into that body, it doesn’t just kill the cancer. It kills everything that makes a child a child.
Kingston lost his hair—yes. But he also lost his ability to walk for two years. Lost his ability to swallow food. Lost his ability to speak. Five months of silence after brain surgery, and the chemo just kept battering the parts of him trying to rebuild.
You don’t recover from that. Not all the way.
The doctors warned us about neutropenia—dangerously low white blood cell counts—and how he’d be vulnerable to every single germ in the world. But I wasn’t prepared for the full-time biohazard protocols we had to live under. How isolated he became. How birthday parties, school days, sleepovers—everything normal—was ripped away. No immune system, no life.
I watched Kingston bleed from his gums. I watched him gasp from pain while peeing razor blades of crystallized chemo shards. I watched his skin peel, his blood counts tank, his little body bruise and break with nothing but stickers and silence to keep him company.
He was nine years old. Nine.
He didn’t get a childhood. He got toxic exposure and clinical side effects dressed up in pastel hospital gowns and vomit bags.
And let’s be brutally honest here—some of the kids don’t even die from the cancer. They die from the chemo. From the infection they can’t fight off because they have no immune system left. From organ failure. From heart attacks caused by anthracyclines. From hemorrhaging when platelets drop too low. From kidneys that stop filtering. From lungs that stop expanding. From neurological damage that causes seizures. From neutropenic sepsis that sweeps them away in a night.
And even when they survive? You wouldn’t call what many of them are left with “living.” Some can’t walk. Some can’t see. Some are cognitively frozen at five or six years old because the brain damage is permanent. Others are riddled with chronic fatigue, endocrine disorders, heart conditions, or second cancers from the treatments they got when they were toddlers.
That’s the future we’re offering them: survive, and we’ll help you limp through the rest of your life.
We celebrate “remission” like it’s a ribbon. But have you ever sat in a room with parents sobbing because their kid is technically cancer-free but can no longer feed themselves? Can’t speak? Can’t attend school without a full-time aide? Can’t remember how to count?
This is the brutal irony—our weapons are so outdated and so toxic, they sometimes do more damage than the cancer itself.
Medulloblastoma, the tumor that took my son, has a five-year survival rate of roughly 70%. But survival doesn’t mean cured. It means alive. And for many kids, “alive” comes with a cruel asterisk. Because the treatment protocol is almost the same as it was 30 or 40 years ago. Radiation to the developing brain. Full spinal chemo. Whole-body poisoning. They’re still using data from the ‘80s and ‘90s to decide how much toxicity a kid can handle before it kills them.
And nobody talks about the ones who don’t make it to the five-year mark—not because the cancer was so powerful, but because the medicine was. Or the medicine failed. Or both.
Kingston’s tumor came back. Not because we didn’t fight hard enough. Not because I missed a single appointment or skipped a single pill. Not because I wasn’t watching. It came back because the disease is relentless, and the science is stalled.
And let me say this as clearly as I can: 80% of pediatric cancers are not preventable. That is not up for debate. There is no diet, lifestyle, or detox protocol that would have saved my son. His cancer wasn’t caused by sugar or cell phones or “toxins” in food. It was cellular mutation, bad luck, genetic roulette. Telling grieving parents that someone like Trump is going to “figure out the root cause” is not just uninformed—it’s cruel.
You want to find a root cause? Start with the fact that only 4% of the National Cancer Institute’s budget goes to pediatric cancer research. Four percent. That’s it. Out of billions. And even less goes toward specific tumors like medulloblastoma. We give more funding to erectile dysfunction than we do to saving dying children.
You want another root cause? Pharmaceutical companies don’t want to spend money on pediatric-specific drug trials because kids don’t make them rich. Adult cancer is where the money is. And because of that, kids are being treated with hand-me-down protocols—stuff that was tested on adult men in the ‘70s and barely adapted for the physiology of a 3-year-old.
Root cause? We’re poisoning children because we can’t be bothered to invent better weapons.
My son deserved better. They all do.
He endured six years of invasive procedures, sedation, radiation, chemotherapy, speech therapy, physical therapy, occupational therapy, and still managed to laugh. Still found ways to joke with the nurses. Still told me, “I’m gonna walk again, Mom. I know it.” And he did. For a while. Until his spine filled with disease again and he couldn’t anymore.
He said he was afraid to go back on chemo because “it burns my whole body and makes my blood sad.”
That’s what he said. He was NINE.
What do you even say to that? How do you argue with your child when they tell you they’re scared the medicine will kill them before the cancer does?
In Kingston’s final weeks, he couldn’t move or speak AT ALL. The metastasis was everywhere—brain, spine, nerves. He was on fentanyl, morphine, Percocet, Ativan, Tylenol, you name it and still whimpered in his sleep. But you know what? The fear in his eyes wasn’t about the cancer. It was about more treatment. The MRI machine. The IVs. The taste of the saline flush. The nausea. The vomiting. The way everything burned.
When people say, “At least he’s not suffering anymore,” I want to nod. But inside, I rage. He never should’ve suffered like that in the first place. This was not fate. This was systemic failure.
If chemotherapy was a cure, we wouldn’t be burying children after it.
I’m not saying stop all treatment. I’m saying stop pretending this is good enough. Stop romanticizing survival as if it doesn’t come with a cost. Stop feeding us platitudes about “brave little fighters” when the real fight should be for funding, for research, for change.
We don’t need ribbons. We need reform.
We don’t need GoFundMe. We need government accountability.
We don’t need thoughts and prayers. We need answers.
We don’t need toxic drugs from 1985. We need cures that don’t destroy the children they’re meant to save.
Kingston died from cancer. But make no mistake—he was also a casualty of indifference. Of outdated medicine. Of scientific neglect. Of policy failure. Of pharmaceutical apathy. Of a world that sees kids with cancer as a sad story, not an urgent emergency.
So if you’re going to post about how you love children, if you’re going to vote for people who say they’ll “cut the fat” from Medicaid, if you’re going to praise politicians for gutting the Department of Education or deregulating healthcare, understand this:
You’re helping bury more children like Kingston.
And the poison you refuse to see?
It’s not just in the medicine.
It’s in the silence.
Sources:
Late effects of cancer treatment in childhood and adolescence
Side Effects of Chemotherapy and Radiation
Short and Long-Term Toxicity in Pediatric Cancer Treatment: Central Nervous System Damage
Editorial: Adverse and Toxic Effects of Childhood Cancer Treatments
Learn more about Kingston’s Journey:
LiveLikeKingston.Org
The AfterWords: Blog