Professor Glenn Marshall doesn’t want you to think about him and the long nights worrying over the kids he’s trying to save from the cruel threat of cancer, or the even longer days he spends at the bedside or laboratory bench hoping for positive results about one of his young patients. He doesn’t want you to think about him, because he’s not the story. Childhood cancer, and fighting it, is the only story he wants to talk about.
What keeps Professor Marshall going through the hours, days, weeks and months is not our thoughts, well-wishes or admiration – which is the overwhelming emotion you feel when speaking to him. It is his patients – the children – who find a way to laugh and smile, despite the terrible ordeals they are enduring.
“Just seeing the kids every day is what keeps me going, meeting the families and just trying to help them,” he says, in his quiet, humble way. “There’s still so much work to do. One in six kids with cancer are still dying, and that’s too many. That’s what gets me out of bed every day. I want every single kid to make it.”
When Professor Marshall, the Head of Translational Research and Molecular Carcinogenesis at the Children’s Cancer Institute (CCI), says that, it doesn’t sound like just a mission statement. It’s spoken with the deep, personal passion of someone who has seen children lost to cancer, grieved with their families and come away determined to do more.
He doesn’t do this work alone, of course, and for several years he’s been receiving financial assistance from our Hyundai Help for Kids partnership with Steven Walter Children’s Cancer Foundation which has a very similar mantra to Professor Marshall – “improving outcomes for children with cancer through targeted treatments and prevention.”
Thank you to everyone who entered our photo competition for the month of August.
You can check out all of the fantastic photos entered here.
