For one of the most popular rock bands in the country, a simple Facebook message from the brother of a 16-year-old boy with terrible cancer began something far bigger than the top charts, MTV, and the Grammys.
In 2011, before Imagine Dragons rose to the top charts and became a Grammy-award winning rock band with millions of fans worldwide, the band’s lead singer, Dan Reynolds, received a message on Facebook from the brother of a devoted fan. The fan was a 16-year-old boy named Tyler Robinson who had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of soft-tissue cancer called Rhabdomyosarcoma. Robinson’s cancer had spread throughout his lymph nodes and bone marrow, and he was told he would need 20 rounds of chemotherapy, a surgery, and six weeks of radiation to treat it — all of which would require him missing his junior year of high school.
“I can’t really explain to you the magic that room,” Reynolds said during the Washington Post’s “Chasing Cancer” conference, recalling how he and his bandmates exchanged phone numbers with Tyler after the show and became close friends with him.
“We watched Tyler as he beat cancer and rang the bell,” Reynolds said, “but then also watched when we found that Tyler had cancer again, and ultimately passed.”
Tyler died in 2013 at age 17.
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After Tyler died, Imagine Dragons decided to co-found the Tyler Robinson Foundation in his honor. The four bandmates weren’t sure what sort of help would have the greatest impact on other patients in Tyler’s shoes, so they turned to Tyler’s family.
“We asked his family, ‘Listen, we don’t know what’s going to be most impactful for these families,” Reynolds recalled. “And they said, ‘Well, look. There’s a lot of unforeseen costs that come into a family’s life when a child is diagnosed with cancer. A lot of times, a parent has to drop out of work, you have to change their diet, which could be a lot more expensive… And then on top of that, you have mortgages, you have all these car payments… you have all these things.'”
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Reynolds went on to explain how the Tyler Robinson Foundation now provides grants to assist with the routine costs — such as housing and utility payments — as well, and as the band members shared with the Washington Post, they try their best to help families just above the poverty line who are barely ineligible for public assistance programs. The Foundation has raised nearly $10 million since it began.
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For the families of the 15,780 children like Tyler Robinson who are diagnosed with pediatric cancer in the U.S. each year, paying for a child’s medical treatment is far from the only added cost that arises. Many parents of children with cancer must reduce their working hours or quit their job to become their child’s full-time caregiver. They must then find a way to pay for the added costs that come with cancer — such as traveling to cancer centers, paying for lodging, and paying for childcare for their other children — all while continuing to make routine payments such as mortgages and utility bills. Keeping up with these payments while reducing work hours becomes a major financial burden on top of the steep medical costs. According to a 2009 report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the average cost of a child’s hospital stay during cancer treatment in the U.S. is roughly $40,000.
As Daniel Platzman, the lead drummer of the rock band, Imagine Dragons, put it in a recent interview at the Washington Post‘s “Chasing Cancer” event, "pediatric cancer is not a diagnosis for one child. It hits the entire family."
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