Chapter 11: we rewrote the story

In the early weeks of 2019, I lived in the thick of a sentence that never ended.

Evelyn’s story had become a long inhale, a page with no punctuation. The MRIs weren’t getting better. Not yet. Each time we brought her to CHEO, I held my breath as the radiologists held up the scans and read them like tea leaves. And what they saw was never nothing.

Other parents at the hospital were getting answers. Treatment plans. Drugs. We weren’t getting plans—we were getting question marks. Still, I tried to hold on. I tried to live in the hours between scans. But the fear hollowed me out. At night, I lay beside her crib and counted breaths like prayer beads.

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.

That was the month I stopped sleeping. Stopped eating. Started hiding in fiction. I wrote more fiction. Happy endings. Bright dialogue and warm beaches. I wrote my way toward a world where my daughter was never sick, and I never had to live in a hospital chair.

And then… something unexpected happened.

January’s MRI wasn’t better—but it wasn’t worse. The lesion hadn’t grown. The mass effect on the aqueduct held steady. No enhancement. No new diffusion restriction. Not great—but not terrible​.

I waited for the relief to flood me. It didn’t. Just more of the same static, white-noise terror. I kept reading notes, grasping at phrases:

“Lesion appears stable.”

“Measurement difficult due to ill-defined margins.”

“Choline/NAA ratio improved.”

“Spectroscopy more normal.”

They were tiny signals in a sea of uncertainty, but they were signals all the same. The story was no longer pointing to inevitable decline. Evelyn, in defiance of everything, was… still herself.

She laughed. She played. Her eyes, once drooping with cranial nerve palsy, were now open wide. The strabismus that had panicked me began to correct.

That’s when Galina came.

Galina was not just a cleaner. She was a Russian grandmother crossed with an Orthodox saint. The kind of woman who sees more than she says. She was a woman of healing energy, a person who floated in and out of our lives with the certainty of someone who already knew how the story ends.

One day, she asked if she could hold Evelyn. Of course, I said yes.

And then she said it:

“She’s not like other babies. She’s an angel. A real one.”

I stopped mid-stir. Galina looked at me, clear-eyed and unblinking.

“She was sent to resolve something,” she said. “Maybe she does not stay long. That’s not sad. That’s sacred.”

I didn’t know what to say. But I never forgot it.

I felt like I’d been hit by cold water and a warm blanket at the same time. Because somewhere, deep in my bones, I already knew Evelyn was special.

* * * * *

In the early days of 2019, Evelyn’s story was not one of healing. Not yet. It was a medical cliffhanger, where every sentence ended in a comma, never a period. The reports coming back from CHEO were frank. The lesion in her midbrain wasn’t just abnormal—it was growing.

Glioma. Brain cancer. The bad kind. The kind you don’t Google unless you want to lose sleep for years.

The lesion had spread subtly. It began in the superior colliculus—the part of the midbrain that coordinates vision—and it reached outward into the thalamus, and downward into the tegmentum, creeping like ivy. The choline was elevated, the NAA reversed, and the spectroscopy showed a signature consistent with glial proliferation. A prominent myoinositol peak shimmered in the analysis, hinting at inflammation, gliosis, or worse.

For a baby, these signs pointed heavily toward malignancy.

But they’d decided not to attempt the biopsy. To enter the brainstem, so essential, so delicate—was to gamble with paralysis, with life itself. And so they chose not to touch it. Not yet. Maybe never.

Instead, Evelyn’s body was left alone, monitored, watched. It was a medical decision, yes. But it was also a leap of faith.

We scheduled another scan for October.​

* * * * *

Evelyn and I went to the MRI. Scanned. Went home.​

A week later, that fall, I was walking down the CHEO hallways to the clinic to review the MRI results. I met Rachel and Rob in the hallway. Their baby, Tessa, shared my birthday. They were new to neurosurgery, lost in the signs, like we had been. I walked them to Dr. McAuley’s office.​

We didn’t know then that Tessa wouldn’t survive.​

I had survivor’s guilt before Evelyn had even survived.​

In between, life demanded a strange kind of choreography. Evelyn grew. Her coordination improved. Her bilateral ptosis seemed to recede. She met her milestones. But every cough, every fever, came under a microscope. I watched her like she was a weather system—tracking pressure, movement, unpredictability.​

And then, I went into Dr. McAuley’s office to review the results. The the scan showed growth.​ Not aggressive, but real. The lesion now measured 1.4 by 1.6 cm. It was more heterogeneous. A central T1 hyperintensity had appeared. There was a new cystic component. Slight blooming. The aqueduct was more displaced. The mass had more definition now—not the kind that brings comfort.​

Spectroscopy remained abnormal. Still no enhancement, but who cared? This wasn’t a dream anymore. It was a math problem. A biological riddle.​

The radiologist wrote it plainly:​

"Appearance favors low-grade glial lesion. Inflammatory or demyelinating lesion is felt less likely."​

And yet—somehow—Evelyn was better. Not worse. Better. She was energetic. Happy. Her balance was back.

So what were we looking at? A ghost? A miracle?​

The lesion didn’t shrink. But it stopped growing. It held. It stabilized. The phrase started showing up in the reports: stable. Difficult to delineate. Possibly evolving.​

Meanwhile, Tessa’s condition worsened. Diagnosed with Atypical Teratoid Rhabdoid Tumor (ATRT), a rare and aggressive brain cancer, she underwent surgery at just three months old to remove as much of the tumor as possible. Following surgery, she began intensive chemotherapy at CHEO, and plans were made for her to receive additional chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. ​

I texted Rachel words of encouragement, trying to offer hope in the face of overwhelming odds. But inside, I grappled with the guilt of watching my child improve while theirs faced such a daunting journey.​

In 2019, I didn't know Tessa wouldn't survive. But the weight of that possibility hung heavy, even then.

Through the rest of 2019, we continued to scan. The MRI from December 14 showed near-identical measurements. The internal components looked slightly different, but not worse. Slight mass effect remained. Choline still elevated. But the dramatic worsening? It had stopped.

Dr. McAuley said, “Let’s keep watching.”

Watching became our religion.

The winter passed in a blur of pediatric ophthalmology, neuro follow-ups, and long nights wondering what would kill us first: the diagnosis, or the waiting.

But Evelyn, my baby girl with the too-bright eyes and old soul, just kept getting better.

Not a miracle. Not yet. But something unexplainable.

By 2020, she was walking. Singing. Cracking jokes. The tumor—if it even was one—stopped behaving like a tumor. It didn’t vanish, but it didn’t fight.

I kept writing romance fiction at night. It wasn’t just an escape. It was also the way I coped with living in the grey zone, in that place between maybe cancer and a cure.

Dr. McAuley once told me: “Sometimes these things disappear. Or they don’t. But they stop mattering.”

We still scan. But no one talks about chemo anymore. No one whispers biopsy.

Her lesion might have been cancer.

It might still be.

But sometime that year, the body began to whisper its own story—one of healing. Of resistance. Of outlasting every terrifying theory.