Rick Rodriguez: A 'raw and real' story of childhood cancer trauma

They are words every parent dreads hearing: "Your child has cancer."

What comes next? How do you cope? Where do you find the strength to battle with and for your loved one?

Those are heart-wrenching, nerve-wracking questions faced by parents of 14,000 children who are diagnosed with cancer each year in the United States.

Starting Sunday and running through Wednesday, Bee staff writer Cynthia Hubert and photographer Renée C. Byer chronicle one local family's struggle with childhood cancer.

Our initial involvement in this story began when Byer met Cyndie French in May 2005 at the Race for a Cure. They spoke about French's 10-year-old son, Derek, who had been diagnosed with a rare childhood cancer, and the struggles the family was facing. They spoke of an opportunity to tell that story.

Shortly thereafter, Byer and Hubert began capturing the highs and lows of dealing with the disease, making extended visits over a year to the French home, in the hospital, at school, in the radiation room and wherever Derek and Cyndie took them.

It is a story that Cyndie French wants told so that others might learn or benefit from their journey.

"I felt that it was important to show people what it's like to really go through this and not hide behind the illusion that everything's fine and everything's normal and everything's fixed," said French, a single mother with four other children, in a taped interview with The Bee.

"This is as raw and real as you get."

And so during the next four days, the "raw and real" story, Cyndie and Derek's story, will appear on the front page of The Bee. It's a story that will inspire you and tug at your emotions. There will be passages and photos that some of you may find difficult to see or to read. They are not meant to shock or to be intrusive. They are meant to inform by telling the real story of a mother trying to cope with her beloved young son's illness while attempting to keep the rest of her life together.

"If I can along the way help just one family and one person understand what it's like to be in someone else's shoes, to live that for just the amount of time it takes to read that paper -- and to look at that and realize that that could be you very easily -- and having empathy and giving of your time, energy and money to make a difference in this fight," French said, "I think that's the most important thing I could get across."

This hasn't been an easy story to tell for Byer and Hubert. They needed the extraordinary access provided to them by Cyndie French and by young Derek. And they needed to be unobtrusive, understanding and caring while still carrying out the goal of telling the story.

Derek quickly grew comfortable and attached to "the Bee ladies," as he called them. And they couldn't help growing attached to him and his family, a fact that is reflected in the care they took to tell this story.

"(Derek) really felt like they were part of the family because that's how our family is. (We) have people that we bring into our lives that we choose to have there and these women just happened to be part of that," Cyndie French said.

Starting Sunday, you will be brought into their lives as you join us in "A Mother's Journey."

About the writer:

• Rick Rodriguez is executive editor and senior vice president of The Bee. He can be reached at (916) 321-1002 or rrodriguez@sacbee.com.