Mom Supports Other Parents After Daughter’s Bone Cancer Diagnosis

Dena Paluck is a mentor to other parents of children with cancer.

When Dena Paluck’s daughter, Laura, was diagnosed with osteosarcoma at age 9, Dena felt overwhelmed and alone as she supported her through nine months of treatment.

Now that Laura is a healthy, active swimmer, Dena is giving back as one of the first volunteer peer mentors for Cancer Hope Network’s Hopeful Hearts program, which connects parents of children with cancer to others who’ve been through it.

CURE: Can you take us back to the moment when your daughter, Laura, was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, and what those first few weeks felt like for you as her mother?

Dena: I'm a cancer survivor myself. I went through it about 15 years ago, so I’ve been in that situation where I’m sitting in the exam room, and I’m told I have cancer. I’ve also dealt with it through my mother, who passed away about 10 years ago from cancer. I’ve personally experienced both ends of the spectrum with a cancer diagnosis.

When I was told that Laura had osteosarcoma, it was overwhelming and terrifying. You don’t really know what it means — but I also knew it didn’t necessarily mean any particular outcome. For me, it was fear and terror, and then very quickly it shifted to logistics. How are we going to deal with this? We both work full time, we have an older child and a dog — what is this going to look like day to day? How long is this going to take?

I just shoved all that terror and fear down, knowing I didn’t have any answers anyway, and pivoted to the daily reality of: how do you sleep in a hospital? How long are we going to be here? There’s a lot of information to absorb very quickly, and that changed my focus from “Oh my goodness, we’re dealing with cancer” to “Let’s deal with day-to-day life.”

What were some of the biggest emotional challenges you faced during Laura's treatment, and how did you find the strength to keep going?

You don’t know what’s going to hit, and that’s incredibly difficult — especially because I like to plan and know what’s coming. In this situation, you just have no idea.

Right off the bat, I learned that she didn’t want to see me cry. She got very upset if she saw me upset. I had to change my approach. I had to hide my emotions, which was really difficult. I tried to process my feelings on my own time and then be present with her.

But then other surprises popped up, like the fact that she couldn’t swallow pills. Why would she be able to? She was 9 years old and had never had an X-ray before — never had anything. Suddenly we were in a world where she had to take a lot of medicine that wasn’t optional, and most of it tasted awful. She was already upset, and that made things incredibly stressful.

They told me they could help teach her to take pills, but you can’t absorb everything they tell you. It took days — maybe a couple weeks — before we realized we could actually teach her. And once we did, it took five minutes. She was amazing at it. That one fix removed this huge hurdle we’d been dealing with.

Those kinds of surprises were the hardest — because you never know what’s coming. I leaned on coping mechanisms I had already developed — like embroidery, which had worked for me during COVID. But that didn’t help for very long. I started going for walks whenever she was out of the room. That helped. Then I turned to reading. I quickly learned: if something works, do it. If it stops working, move on. Try something else.

You mentioned that during Laura's treatment, you often felt isolated. What kind of support or connection were you hoping for during that time?

We’re very fortunate to have a wonderful support system — lots of friends and community. But this is such a specific situation. Even within cancer, osteosarcoma is incredibly rare. I didn’t have anyone in my world who could really relate to what I was going through.

We met families in the hospital who were dealing with the same diagnosis, but when you’re in it, you don’t have the capacity to help someone else deal with it too. That was a gap. I didn’t have someone who could relate directly.

Everyone in my world was also connected to me, so they were invested in the outcome. That meant I couldn’t talk about the scariest thoughts — like, what if she doesn’t make it? What if surgery fails? She didn’t respond to chemo the way we’d hoped. But I couldn’t really say that to anyone. People would just try to reassure me — and that’s not bad — but it wasn’t what I needed.

I really would have appreciated someone who could let me explore those fears — someone neutral, who wasn’t emotionally invested. Someone who would let me deal with the terror before I had to live it out. Thankfully, I haven’t had to — but I still feel like I’ve never had space to process what that would mean. That’s something I’m still trying to work through.

Transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness

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