In Cancer Fight, Teenagers Don’t Fit In

Simone Weinstein’s ordeal with cancer started in the most banal way: she was tired. She had a hard time getting up in the morning, and did not even have the energy to hang out with her friends.

But Simone was 14. Her mother thought she was just a typical teenager.

“She’d say, ‘I don’t know what to do with you,’ ” said Miss Weinstein, now a 20-year-old student at Whittier College in California, who was finally given a diagnosis of the blood cancer called acute lymphoblastic leukemia. “She thought I was being a normal, somewhat lazy, silly teenager.”

That is not unusual, even though 1 in 333 children develops a malignancy by age 20, and the disease leads to more deaths in the 15-to-19 age group than any other single illness.

Read the full article at nytimes.com