Chapter 10: the only choice we had left

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.

But I heard them.

“Lesion.” “Brainstem.” “Cancer still on the table.”

I was supposed to be getting used to the language by then. But those words weren’t just medical—they were weapons. And they were coming in soft. Which made them worse.

December 14th, 2018. The day we did another MRI. The kind with contrast. The kind where your baby doesn’t just go in asleep—she goes under. A gas mask. An IV. You’re not allowed in the room. They tell you that like it’s procedure, but it lands like an exile. I had to hand her over again.

I told them how she’d wake up: angry. Screaming. Disoriented and wild. I begged them—please—call me as soon as she opens her eyes. She is a baby but she will fight. She will punch.

I paced the waiting room like someone in a courtroom hallway waiting for a verdict. I tried not to think about what we might find. I tried not to imagine her inside that tube. Still. Tiny. Drugged. Scanned.

The radiologists were kind. They always are. Like funeral home kind. Polite. Gentle. With eyes that say, I’m sorry you’re here.

Dr. McAuley had warned me—“Radiology always makes things sound worse than they are. Wait until I talk to you about it.”

That night, I did what I was told not to do. I opened MyChart. It was all there. The scan. The report. The buried horror beneath a sea of technicalities.

But how the hell do you not look?

“Redemonstration of asymmetric thickening and enlargement of the superior colliculus on the right side… Indistinct hyperintensity in the midbrain… Posteromedial aspect of the right thalamus… Interval increase in lesion conspicuity… Mass effect on the aqueduct…”

What does that even mean? I searched every term, every line.

And there it was:

“Elevation of choline with reversal of choline/NAA ratio. Prominent myoinositol peak at 3.5 ppm.”

I shouldn’t have known what that meant.

But I learned. The choline/NAA ratio—when reversed—means increased cell turnover. Tumour metabolism. The myoinositol peak? Often linked to gliosis. Or a glial tumour. A glioma.

This was the radiologist’s final note:

“Strongly favor a mitotic etiology lesion, probably diffuse midline glioma, as the most probable diagnosis.”

“Discussed with Drs. Sell and McAuley.”

They were saying it. Quietly. But clearly.

Diffuse Midline Glioma.

DIPG.

Aggressive brain cancer.

The illness no one walks away from.

I stared at the screen with Evelyn’s head against my arm. Her tiny body twitching in sleep from the sedation hangover. My laptop open. My phone glowing. Tabs open to health research. Articles. Brain diagrams. Parent forums.

No one had a story like ours.

Or if they did… they didn’t write the ending.

The next day, we were back in clinic. McAuley came into the room like a priest. He didn’t open with news. He sat down. He waited for me to speak. And when I didn’t, he did.

“We’re seeing changes,” he said. “It’s not good.”

I nodded. Waiting for the rest. He looked at Evelyn, then back to me. 

“We could biopsy,” he said, slowly. “But it’s the brainstem. If we go in, the risk is real—paralysis, complications, even death. And even if it is a tumour… chemo for a baby her age carries enormous risk—hearing loss, developmental delay, long-term unknowns.”

He let the words sit.

Then came the impossible options:

Biopsy: You might learn something. You might lose her.

Chemo: You might fight something real—or cause new, worse problems.

Wait: You might miss your only window to save her.

The decision? Wait.

Three more weeks. Another scan. No chemo. No biopsy. Just… watch. Hope. Pray the lesion softens. Pray the markers change.

“Steroids might still help,” he said. “We’ll continue immunotherapy. She’s young. There’s still a chance.”

I nodded. But inside me, something gave way.

Because it meant going home knowing that my child might have cancer. Brain cancer. And that the best course of action was to do nothing. He said he couldn’t make her better. Only sicker. So we had no choice, really.

So I breastfed her that night with the same arms that held her through sedation. I held her knowing she might be fading while I folded laundry. And I smiled at her the way mothers do—like I wasn’t screaming on the inside.

And I kept going. That’s what December demanded.

I went to appointments. I walked the familiar halls of CHEO with my baby on my hip, singing lullabies that cracked in my throat.

I showed up to every clinic visit—ophthalmology, neurology, neurosurgery—with a notebook in my hand and rage in my chest.

I studied her eyes. I timed her naps. I tested her reflexes with my finger like it mattered. Because doing something—anything—was better than sitting still.

One afternoon, in the hallway, a nurse said gently, “You seem to know a lot.”

And I smiled. Because that’s the only way to answer something like that.

She didn’t know that every night, after Evelyn was asleep, I would sit in the dark and search: “Can a brain tumour shrink on its own?”

“False positive spectroscopy.”

“Brainstem tumour DIPG spontaneous remission.”

Nothing came up.

Nothing.

Because no one has this story.

There is no story where a diffuse midline glioma in an eight-month-old goes away.

And yet—I needed that to be our story. I needed it to exist.

Because otherwise, what the fuck were we doing?

We weren’t fighting it. We weren’t treating it. We were just waiting.

Waiting for a tumour to get worse.

There’s something you learn in those long months in pediatric neurosurgery: terror has a tempo. It’s not constant. It surges in scans, softens in temporary stability, rears again in new terminology. The doctors all lived in that rhythm. I learned it from them.

The neurologist’s hopeful tone became less persuasive. His “ninety percent” never updated. It stayed static, like a defense mechanism. As if to change the number would mean admitting something irreversible.

Dr. McAuley never played with numbers like that. He never gave me a false binary. He watched the scans. He watched me. He once sat in the room silently for minutes before speaking.

When he finally did, all he said was: “We still don’t know what it is. But it’s not gone.”

He gave me truth. Carefully, but fully. He gave me the dignity of reality. And in doing so, he gave me back my own strength.

* * * * *

On Christmas morning, Evelyn woke up tired. Pale. Her eyes couldn’t quite track evenly. One was still lazy. Her body was softer than usual. And still… she smiled.

We laid her down near the tree. Took photos. Held our breath.

Inside, I was burning alive.

And it was during that stretch—those blank middle weeks—that I learned to split myself into two people.

There was the person who held it together for family photos. And the one who stood in the kitchen after everyone had left, holding the edge of the counter, silently spiralling because her baby might die before she turned two.

It was also when I stopped trying to journal my anxiety at night. The entries had become loops of terror.

So I started writing something else.

Romance. Fiction. Happy endings.

I created characters with soft futures. Lovers who found each other. Women who didn’t lose children. Stories with clarity and light and closure.

I wrote under a fake name—Zoe Normandie. Because it felt like hiding in a warm house during a storm.

I didn’t want to be the character anymore.

I wanted to be somewhere else. Anywhere else. Now I’m sixteen titles deep.

But I always came back. Back to Evelyn. Back to the uncertainty. Back to the reality that no one had answers. Just watch and wait.

And then, on the edge of the year’s end, I did what any mother would do when science fails to soothe her.

I made a promise.

I whispered it into Evelyn’s hair one night while she slept on my chest.

“You are not a statistic. You are not done. You are going to live.”

And I said it again.

And again.

Until it became a mantra. Until it was more real than the reports. Until it was the only thing holding me together.

And I believed it.

Because hope—stupid, reckless, beautiful hope—is what we do when all other tools have failed us.

And that’s how December ended. Not with a resolution. But with resolve.

A mother. A child. A maybe-glioma. A maybe-miracle.

And three more weeks until the next scan.

Because that was the only choice we had left.

To wait.

And hope.

And hold.

Hard.