When your child is diagnosed with cancer, your world becomes very small. It shrinks to hospital corridors, waiting rooms, and test results. Plans dissolve into a blur of scans and surgeries. For families facing neuroblastoma, a rare and aggressive childhood cancer, this narrow world can also feel impossibly isolated.

I know this world all too well. I am the mother of Shir, a little boy whose neuroblastoma diagnosis turned our family’s life upside down, and the founder of Shir for Life, a nonprofit born from that experience. In those early days, I felt what so many parents feel: that we were fighting alone.
But if you zoom out far enough, you see something else entirely: families, doctors, and scientists on different continents, in different time zones, working on the very same problem at the very same time. Parents in London joining a Zoom support group with parents in Tel Aviv. A child in São Paulo receiving a treatment first tested in a trial that enrolled children from Chicago to Paris. None of these stories is possible without one thing: collaboration.
This is the spirit behind International Neuroblastoma Awareness Day, which Shir for Life helped launch and which is now marked each year on December 5 in more than 50 countries. The day’s theme, “Together We Can,” is more than a slogan—it’s a survival strategy, born from hard lessons about what does and doesn’t work when you’re trying to cure a rare disease.