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Two families, one fight: Orangeville marks Childhood Cancer Awareness Month

September 10, 2026   ·   0 Comments

By Sam Odrowski

Peter Tomlins was diagnosed with cancer two weeks after his granddaughter, Sarah Hamby, was diagnosed with leukemia. She was three years old. He was 62.

“I’m the guy that recovered, not her,” he said.

Sarah passed away last October, after a 13-year fight with the disease. Standing at Orangeville’s Town Hall for this year’s Childhood Cancer Awareness Month flag raising and proclamation on Sept. 3, Tomlins spoke about what that kind of loss does to a family, and how they carry it.

“You stay on deck, and you do what you can for the people that are left,” he said. “That’s what you do.”

Beside him was Mono resident Mark Campbell, whose connection to childhood cancer runs on a parallel track. His daughter fought leukemia from the time she was one year old until she was four and went into remission. A year later the cancer returned and she fought it a second time. She’s 18 now and has been cancer-free ever since.

For families like theirs, childhood cancer reshapes relationships and finances long after it ends, and it leaves behind a particular kind of grief that never fully goes away for survivors, parents and grandparents.

Unseen financial burden

Both men described the financial strain that comes with a child’s cancer diagnosis, which often shows up in ways people never expect.

“The cost of parking down at Sick Kids… sometimes you have to get a room because there’s no room at Ronald McDonald House. You’re eating all your meals out,” Tomlins said. “There’s a lot of expenses that go along with it that are not necessarily emergencies.”

Campbell didn’t mince words about who the system leaves behind.

“I would say that ideally you want to be at the poverty level or very wealthy to survive this financially,” he said. “If you’re what they call middle income, forget it, because the government won’t help you.”

Hospital parking alone can cost families thousands of dollars each year.

“One year, I spent $2,800,” said Campbell.

For families making regular trips to Sick Kids, sometimes multiple times a week for months or years, it’s the kind of cost that isn’t covered and rarely gets mentioned until families are already living it.

The financial strain came to a head for Campbell’s family when they tried to claim his wife as a dependent on their taxes, since she’d left work to provide their daughter 24-hour care as an infant. After years of advocacy from cancer organizations, the CRA changed its policy to allow it, but that change did little to help the Campbells when they filed under the new rule and were audited.

After sending in their claim, the family waited roughly eight weeks before hearing back from the CRA — not with an approval, but with a letter saying the agency needed more information and had destroyed the documents they already submitted, meaning everything had to be resent from scratch. Campbell said they were only able to comply because his wife had kept a copy of every document.

That cycle repeated roughly six times, each round asking for further detail, until the final package the Campbells couriered back was several inches thick — thick enough that Campbell paid about $40 to have it sent. It wasn’t until he asked to speak with a supervisor and threatened to take the story to the media that the tax refund was finally approved.

“How many families give up?” Campbell said of the process.

In Canada, 33 to 40 per cent of cancer patients report significant financial distress following a diagnosis. Ontario’s Pediatric Oncology Group says that burden falls hardest on families who must reduce work hours or leave jobs altogether while managing out-of-pocket costs like parking, travel and accommodation.

Impact on relationships

Money isn’t the only thing families lose when a child is diagnosed with cancer.

“Your friends disappear because they’re scared, they don’t know what to say, and it’s too awkward for them, so they just disappear,” Campbell said.

The instinct to stay silent rather than risk saying the wrong thing usually backfires, he told the Citizen.

“I’d rather you ask and run the risk… that’s better than someone not asking you at all,” Campbell said.

What people don’t always see, Tomlins added, is how far the disruption spreads beyond the immediate family. Grandparents step in to raise siblings while parents are at the hospital.

Extended family members each find their own way to help, because, as he put it, “everybody has to kind of dig in and do their share as best they can.”

The compassion of the community

Against all that, both men were quick to point out how much support shows up, often in unexpected ways.

Tomlins described a Beeton veterinarian who volunteered to look after the family’s pets for free during his granddaughter’s treatment, and neighbours who quietly cleared his family’s driveway through the winter without being asked.

“It would just be done by elves in the night,” he said.

Campbell agreed, and added that the gesture goes both ways.

“I don’t think people realize that the person doing the shoveling gets as much out of that as the family does,” he said.

That instinct to help is also what Candlelighters was built around. What started as an advocacy group in Barrie nearly 30 years ago has grown into an organization that also runs an emergency fund for families in crisis, and its territory now stretches across Simcoe County, reaching into Dufferin County.

Campbell sits on the board of Candlelighters and described putting out a call for assistance after a single mother’s car broke down, leaving her without a way to get her child to treatment.

“I’ll get a text within two minutes. What do you need? Send me the bill,” he said.

It’s the kind of gap that government programs rarely cover, as single parents are left without work and two-parent households are left with a single income the moment a child is diagnosed.

“Pick your poison,” he said. “One of you has to quit working.”

The Candlelighters support families through these situations from the moment of diagnosis, connecting newly diagnosed families with resources through a liaison at Sick Kids and stepping in with its emergency fund whenever a bill threatens to become the reason a child misses treatment.

It’s a small, quiet system, but for families forced to choose between a paycheque and a bedside, it can be the difference between managing and drowning.

Outside Orangeville Town Hall, as the Childhood Cancer Awareness flag went up, it wasn’t hard to read what it meant: no family facing a diagnosis is supposed to fight it alone.

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