In speaking with two 17-year-old Harrison High School girls whose sisters were diagnosed with leukemia, I asked them whether they felt there was more stress on them or less because of their sister’s illnesses.

Their reactions were twofold: it’s hard to watch your sister so ill and know you can’t do anything.

Alexa Luiso, whose sister was diagnosed last year, found herself having to watch her younger sibs because her parents were spending time at the hospital.

“I felt I had to take a parental role. My other younger sister was (ill for a different reason) and shew as at one hospital, my other sister at another. I felt like I had to be there for them. I try to help out as much as possible because it’s not easy on anybody.

“I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining or I’m not willing to help or I don’t sympathize but … I have things to get done on my own. I’m trying to get into college. When you are in this state of mind, it’s not a good idea to worry about everything. You need to get past all your problems or it will build up and it’s more stress.”

Alexa Luiso and Christi Marraccini, both 17-year-old Harrison High students, were very frank when they spoke to me about how cancer affected them—both their older sisters were diagnosed with leukemia.

They spoke about how the school rallied around both their sisters—Toni Marraccini as an elementary-age child about a decade ago and Amanda Luiso last year—and how they relied on each other for immediate support when everybody was taken up with the older girls’ illness.

“When I first found out, it was hard for me to get back into the school mode. There’s six of us at home. I feel we came together as a family. When I came to school, I couldn’t take my mind off of what was happening at home. I was worried about my grades falling—junior year is very important, it’s the most important year. I wrote my college essay on just getting through everything, ” Alexa said.

“That Monday, just going into school, I didn’t even want to come,” she said. “We would break down during periods. We went to meet with the psychologist and she explained this was a hard time, it’s going to be hard to come to school. We’ll get through it together.”

Gary Armida, whose wife was diagnosed with breast cancer shortly after they were married, spoke a little about his response to student writing when the subject matter is something as sensitive as a reaction to cancer in a family member or friend. Armida teaches English at North Rockland High School. He says that he’ll sometimes write a little note on an essay letting a student know that he understands.

“I do think kids look for a sounding board. They’re going to need your support and supervision at the same time. It’s tough. It’s tough.

“You sit there and you appreciate that they have enough courage or trust in you to share it. I do find that 90 precent of the kids are very willing to share, especially on paper.

“It’s hard to read a lot of them, it’s hard to throw a grade on them. I still struggle with that. I think other teachers struggle with that. How do I grade this? These are part of the problem, but it’s not even a problem related to writing. It’s all on the cuff. You fly by the seat of your feet. Every kid is different.”

At the end of my interview with four North Rockland High sophomores, I asked them about their thoughts of death and whether being touched by cancer changed the way they thought about the future. I asked them their views on people they knew who had been diagnosed with cancer.

Here are some of their responses:

Nikki Esposito, 16: “I think you just live your life. You don’t know when it could be taken away. You should live it to fullness…definitely, you look at people though different eyes because … they have been through so much and they’re still walking tall and you look at them through a whole different perspective. I would look up to them just because of so much courage, look at the glass half full and not look in the past.”

Raven Hopkins, 15: “I’m extremely optimistic. When I read, I like to learn about good, how someone overcame something, they broke down walls…. It’s not so much I’m afraid of death. Death doesn’t scare me, but I worry ‘what’s going to happen to my sister if I wasn’t here’ or ‘what would be the reaction on my grandmother’, ‘what would I do without my mother?’ It’s the other people, the people left behind.”

I asked four students from North Rockland High School whether they’ve Googled information on cancer and three said yes.

Nikki Esposito, 16, said she didn’t. This was her reason:

“I haven’t looked. I’m scared I will be more conscious and I will be paranoid. I don’t want to know the signs of cancer. I don’t want to be more aware ‘my grandma’s getting to THAT stage. I don’t want to be that fearful. I don’t want to put a timeline on someone’s life.”

I asked four North Rockland High School students whether school was less important or more important to them while they were dealing with family or other close acquaintance cases of cancer, and how being touched with cancer affected their schooling:

Jared Rajchgad, 15: “For me, it hasn’t affected me or work although you know it’s always there. When I’m in school, I’m focusing on my schoolwork, trying to block out everything that’s distracting.”

Nikki Esposito, 16: “School was a (place) to come to clear your head and escape. You have protection.”

Raven Hopkins: “It’s a way to block out everything else. When you are in school, you are suppoed to be more about school. It’s hard to block things out, but the only way to really succed is to focus in, drill in. School was like an escape, that’s why a lot of kids do after-school activities.”

Spencer Kennard: “I don’t (believe) it really affects my school work. I don’t feel I’m trying to suppress anything. Someone that’s dealing with cancer, they’re appreciating things a lot more.”

I asked four North Rockland High School students whether they talk about their experiences, their worries, their fears about cancer with school people—psychologists, social workers, guidance counselors—or if they didn’t tell anybody at all and just kept things to themselves:

Nikki Esposito, 16: “I probably wouldn’t broadcast if someone I know or I had cancer, but I know I have my close friends and family and know they are my backbone. I would feel comfortable talking about that, they would comfort me or support me. Cancer is a very serious matter. I don’t feel comfortable sharing it with people.”

Raven Hopkins, 15: “Me and my close, close friends, we sit and have serious conversations, we talk about things that go out in the world. It’s a group of best friends, the four of us. When I was younger, I kept all my problems to myself. My feeling now is you vent your feelings.

Hopkins continued, “I tell my mom everything. If I ever have a concern, we can talk about it. If I’m going through a hard time, she’s going through it with me. It’s easy for me to share things with her, we’re so close. She has lost a lot of her friends and a lot of people (to cancer). I know that I can look up to her.”

Jared Rajchgod, 15: “I would definitely talk about it with my family, my mom and dad, if I had a problem. Even it’s kind of a scary thought, I was always comfortable asking them: Mom, do I have cancer?”

I spoke to four North Rockland High School sophomores about whether they pay attention to people who come to talk to them during assemblies. Here are some of their responses:

Jared Rajchgad, 15: “I feel people should be made more aware of the smoking because people almost take it for granted, like you should definitiely take more care. It can take your life very quickly. Maybe in school they should hold programs on how serious it is, show the students that cancer is a very serious thing.”

Raven Hopkins, 15: “I think I would pay attention to someone with experience, otherwise it’s going to be boring because he has no idea what he’s talking about. He knew some person, but has not personally been through something like that? If it’s not something you’ve faced, there’s no ‘umph’ to it. Nobody really cares what you have to say unless you have hard evidence.”

Nikki Esposito, 16: “If you don’t have an experience suffering with cancer, then you don’t undertand all it entails.”

I had the opportunity to interview four North Rockland sophomores who volunteered to talk about how cancer had touched their lives.

I asked the students whether being exposed to cancer made them more aware of cancer or affected how they talked about it with their friends. Here is what Raven Hopkins, 15, said:

“Knowing so many people (affected by cancer), it makes me want to inform them what’s involved, show them what it can do to you, show them how the cancer rate is exploding. It makes me want to shake them, (say) ‘You to take care of yourself to make sure you are not the one’ because it’s hard being sick. I don’t think people realize how much they are affecting their family when they are gone. It makes them—it looks like people are selfish, they don’t care. They don’t.”

Here’s how Spencer Kennard, 16 answered the same question:

“I talk about it with friends and family. I think that cancer is so rampant in society, I think that people have all—either they have seen something like ER —like it’s become numb and unless it happens to you, people blank it off.”

Anna Gottlieb, executive director and founder of Gilda’s Club Seattle.

“We didn’t do a lot of teen things. We couldn’t get kids to come into the clubhouse. They didn’t want the stigma of it. We were sitting around brainstorming ways to get teens in and I said ‘why don’t we try a teen writing contest?’

“The foundation said, ‘I don’t think kids will do it’ but they agreed anyway and we put a brochure together. This is the our third year doing it.

“I think our first year, we got about 50 essays and they were mind-boggling. They were unbelieveable. Now you can read them online. They were incredible. They were things we kind of suspected kids might be thinking or feeling but they never talk about it. We had one girl who wrote shewished her father had died because his leukemia had taken up her childhood. This year, we had over 150 submissions.

“We found something that started out so innocently and grew into some of the most important things we do.”

Erin McAllister, program director of Gilda’s Club South Jersey, on how a school staff member with cancer affects the school:

“I think it has a huge impact, especially if it’s a favorite teacher. A lot of kids spend more time with their teacher than their families. That routine is so important for them. Then they see a teacher hasn’t been in and hear rumors … it’s important to be up front and honest with them.

“It’s something they put in the back of their mind that has a lasting impression. Kids who have lost a teacher to cancer have been drastically impacted by it. If it’s a bad experience, every person will die. If it’s a survivor, then that person, that teen, is going to learn that if someone is diagnosed they can survive.”

Any long story involves numerous interviews and data collection, much of which needs to be winnowed out to enhance a story’s clarity.

That was the case with the story that ran today in the newspaper about kids, schools and cancer.

Over the next few days, I’ll be supplementing the written report here in the Hall Monitor with some of the comments and information collected during the reporting of the story that, for one reason or another, didn’t make the final edit.

Much of what the students and staff I interviewed had to say was pertinent, heart-wrenching or enlightening. I would like to pass on to readers some of their issues and comments over the next several days. So keep watch.

Erin McAllister, program director, Gilda’s Club South Jersey: “We went into one school that had absolutely no idea if kids had been touched by cancer. They couldn’t name one kid. We did some outreach and had 20 kids at our first meeting.

“There are tons of myths in the high school. We still have kids who think cancer is contagious, or that people are sick from cancer itself (instead) of the chemo. They ask ‘why do you lose your hair?’ You can end a lot of myths by doing a little education, by getting them talking about the medical part of cancer. It lets this communication about social/emotional happen.”