I should go back to the beginning.

Not the beginning-beginning—just the part where things stopped being easy. Where the motherhood story I thought I was going to have started rewriting itself quietly in the background, one chart, one scan, one specialist visit at a time.

It was October 2018, and everything was supposed to be good.

My mom and Zed were getting married after ten years together—an actual celebration, a rare moment when life felt expansive and happy.

The week before we left for Los Angeles, I talked myself back to CHEO. Not for a checkup. Not for a follow-up. For an emergency.

Evelyn was still sleepy. Still heavy. Still just… off. And I couldn’t explain it in clinical terms. I couldn’t chart it or present it like a case study. But I knew.

It was Halloween in Los Angeles.

We dressed Evelyn in a little outfit. I don’t remember what it was—a pumpkin, a mouse, maybe something with ears. It doesn’t matter. The photos from that day are still on my phone, and when I look at them now, it’s like staring at someone else’s baby. Because I can see it in her eyes—what wasn’t right.

There is something sacred about Sunday mornings. The stillness. The slowness. The sense that if something is going to be wrong, it can wait. But this one didn’t.

November 4, 2018. It was a Sunday morning in CHEO’s emergency department. I was there, camped out, holding Evelyn, my mother beside me.

The hospital didn’t run on clocks that week. It ran on countdowns. On waiting. On fasting.

On this brutal loop: Wake up. Hold still. Don’t feed her. Hold her again.

Friday was the day the air changed.

Friday was the day I stopped hoping for the easy answer.

Friday was the day I learned what it means when a doctor looks at you and chooses not to comfort, but to respect you—with the truth. 

By midnight, I had already gone too far down the path.

The MRI from that morning had confirmed everything we feared. The lesion was still there. Worse than before.

Saturday morning came with that eerie, oppressive quiet—the kind that only follows a seismic shift. The kind of silence that doesn’t soothe. It watches. It waits.

I was still in the hospital. Still in the new room. I barely remembered moving. Just a vague awareness that we weren’t in the same dark corner of the ward anymore.

December didn’t start with sirens. It started with whispers.

Not the dramatic kind. Not the ones that throw you into action. The ones you almost miss. Like the hallway mutterings of a medical team trying not to spook the mother within earshot.

Evelyn’s brain was described in millimeters, in sequences, in transverse dimensions, but nothing about her felt measurable. She was a baby with cheeks like apples and a spirit that seemed to shine brighter the darker the room got.

But then 2020 arrived. And the lesion still hadn’t budged.

The phrase “diffuse midline glioma” was still there, buried in the footnotes of Evelyn’s chart. But the doctors no longer spoke it with conviction.

In the spring of 2024, a note from Dr. McAuley reads, “It was my pleasure to meet with Evelyn, her parents and sibling today at Neurosurgical Clinic… happily, she is very well.”

That single word—happily—took years to arrive.