For three months, Rowena Simmers has been fighting acute myeloid leukemia from a bed at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town.

She is 14. AML is an aggressive blood cancer, and the protocol in front of her is not a short stay. Doctors expect her treatment to keep her in hospital for about six months. Every day is another round of medicine, monitoring, and the quiet courage it takes to be a teenager in a ward instead of a schoolyard.

Before the diagnosis, Rowena was one of the top 10 learners at her school in Knysna. That is the life she keeps aiming at: the classroom, the work she was good at, the ordinary business of being 14. Cancer interrupted the ranking. It has not erased the ambition.

Her mother, Yolanda Oelf, made the choice many parents of very sick children eventually face. She left her job so she would not have to leave her daughter. Treatment at a government hospital means the core medical care is covered. It does not mean life around the bed is free. Transport, food away from home, toiletries, lost wages, the small costs that stack up over months — those still land on one household.

So the ask from people around them is simple. Keep Rowena in your thoughts. If you can give, give. If you can share, share. The point is not to turn a child’s illness into a spectacle. It is to make sure a mother can stay in the chair beside the drip without watching the rest of the family’s life collapse.

Rowena has already spent a quarter of a year in hospital. She still talks about going back to school. That, as much as any scan, is what she is fighting for.

She is not meant to do it alone.

Source: Family appeal shared by Yolanda Oelf on behalf of Rowena Simmers, Groote Schuur Hospital, Cape Town.