[Comment] Improving access to surgery for childhood cancer

“Why is it that there’s such rank injustice in fortune itself?”1 Dyoma was a thoughtful child with cancer in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, with a lower extremity tumour requiring amputation despite radiation and injections. Medical oncology can claim remarkable advancements for many generations, but to most people in the world cancer surgery remains in fiction. Among the millions of people diagnosed with cancer every year, 80% will need a surgical procedure at some point in their treatment and three of four will find such surgery prohibitively expensive and dangerous, or unavailable.