Chapter 13: she stayed. and so did I

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.

It didn’t come easily. It wasn’t guaranteed. In fact, it sat for years just outside the realm of possibility. This wasn’t a story that built toward triumph in some tidy arc. This was a story where the ending kept getting postponed, reshaped, re-understood.

For years, Evelyn lived in the space between possible diagnoses. Inflammatory. Neoplastic. Demyelinating. For years, the words “brainstem lesion” remained a clinical truth but an emotional mystery. For years, the family was told: “We don’t know exactly what this is.”

And that was the truth.

One scan would show signal changes. Another, stability. Phrases like “slight enhancement” or “ill-defined margins” peppered the imaging notes from 2018 through 2024.

But with every passing year, the possibilities narrowed—not toward horror, but toward peace.

No biopsy. No chemotherapy. No craniotomy. Just observation. Relentless, quiet, clinical watching.

By February 2024, the records show a shift—not in Evelyn’s condition, but in the medical confidence surrounding it. Hydrocephalus, once a terrifying unknown, was now documented as resolved. Bradycardia—resolved. MRI abnormalities—resolved. Her brain, once the center of frightening ambiguity, had grown stable. Not pristine. But stable.

The phrase “stable appearance” recurs again and again in her charts like a quiet, clinical prayer.

There was no miracle moment. No climactic scan where the doctors burst into the room with champagne and shouted, “She’s cured!”

Instead, there was time. And time did what it sometimes does when medicine can’t: it healed.

Or perhaps more accurately, it didn’t worsen. Which, when you’re talking about potential brain cancer, is healing enough.

Now it’s 2025. Evelyn is seven. Her most recent scan was performed without sedation. She laid still in the tube. A miracle in itself. The results came back with familiar words: stable. No new enhancement. No mass effect. No midline shift. Her MR spectroscopy is normal. The dreaded choline/NAA reversal has been absent for years. Her myoinositol peak—once suggestive of inflammation—is now interpreted as benign.

There’s a new buzzword: “presumed low-grade glioma.” But even that is starting to sound like a formality.

She is off treatment. She is in school. She is alive.

There are still no clear answers. No postmortem pathology. No biopsy. No moment where someone turned and said, “Here’s what happened.” The official diagnosis remains a haze. But the outcome—that much is sharp.

Evelyn simply… didn’t get sicker.

And the story lives on, not because of its clarity, but because of its complexity. Because the body sometimes knows how to heal before medicine can name what’s broken. Because sometimes the odds don’t win. Because sometimes you leave the hospital not with a discharge note, but with a whole new story.

Because sometimes the lesion disappears.

And sometimes… it never mattered who understood why.

There’s a strange grief that comes after the survival. A grief that no one warns you about.

Because the danger passes—but the knowing doesn’t.

You still flinch when the phone rings after a scan.

You still watch her sleep like it might stop.

You still hear the word tumour in every shadow of a sentence, even when the doctors stopped saying it years ago.

And yet…

She runs.

She climbs.

She sings songs she made up.

She eats breakfast like the world has always been this good.

And you learn, slowly, to be present.

To let the joy come in.

To let the fear move to the background.

To build a life that isn’t just a monument to what might’ve happened—but a celebration of what did.

You still carry the others.

You carry Tessa.

You carry the mothers who walked the hallway but didn’t walk out.

You carry the versions of yourself who lived in the MRI suites, the overnight chairs, the hollow days of Maybe.

But you’re not there anymore.

You’re here.

With your daughters.

With your story.

With a life that outgrew the fear, even if you never fully did.

You’re not waiting anymore.

You’re living.

* * * * *

It’s been years now.

And yet, some mornings, I still wake up with a pulse pounding through my neck, my breath shallow, some leftover shard of fear pressing down on my chest like the weight of an old nightmare I never asked for. That’s what trauma does. It sticks around. Even when you think it’s gone. Even when you’re sipping your coffee and packing school lunches and trying to convince yourself that everything is normal.

It’s not always. Not completely.

We still have regular scans to watch Evelyn’s tumour. Is it dead? Alive? Dormant? There are still no answers.

Just hope.

My therapist said I have PTSD. From all this. From all of it. The surgeries. The shadow of a tumour. The impossible wait. The watching. The knowing and not knowing. The imagining of futures that never came. The imagining of endings that, mercifully, never arrived.

She said I carry anxiety now like a second skin. Like an extra organ that pumps stress instead of blood. It lives in the corner of my mind, always coiled, always waiting for the next shoe to drop. And even though the MRI says “stable” and my daughter’s laughter is the soundtrack of my life, the fear doesn’t leave. It evolves. It softens into vigilance. Into caution. Into that sixth sense you wish you didn’t need—where your brain’s first instinct is to check for what’s wrong.

That’s what it is to parent after the unthinkable almost happens.

And it’s changed me. Fundamentally.

I live now in the aftermath. In the hush that follows the storm. In the rebuilding.

We are okay. We are good. Evelyn is okay—thriving, in fact. Precocious and radiant and alive in a way that should not be taken for granted. Claire is a riot of joy. Emma is the light of my life. We have a dog, a cat. Our house is loud and messy and warm. It’s everything I hoped for on those dark nights in the hospital when I thought I might never get to see a future like this.

And yet.

There’s a scar. There’s always a scar.

Not just on Evelyn’s head. But on my heart. On my nervous system. On my marriage. On how I parent. On how I hold joy. I hold it tightly now. Maybe too tightly. I try not to suffocate it. But when you’ve known the fragility of life in its most brutal clarity, you don’t just “bounce back.” You reshape.

I used to freak out when Evelyn toddled down uneven sidewalks. I was terrified she would fall.

I don’t feel that way with Claire. And with my second child, a healthy child, I started to understand what PTSD and anxiety look like. And how it manifests in me.

There’s a part of me that still walks those halls at CHEO, still pushes that stroller at 4:30 a.m., fasting my baby for scans that might upend everything. There’s a part of me that still lives in the chair where I rocked her to sleep while wondering if she’d grow up. That part doesn’t go away. It integrates.

It’s the part that writes this book.

Because I needed to say it. Because people need to understand what it is to live through the gray zone of medicine—the part where no one is sure, where answers don’t come with guarantees, where hope and horror sit side by side. Because silence is its own kind of trauma, and I needed to name mine.

This story is not tidy. There is no neat resolution. There are only annual MRIs, guarded optimism, and a new rhythm of life that includes gratitude and vigilance in equal measure.

But I’ve also learned something surprising in the quiet years since.

There’s grace in the unknown.

There’s a strange, sharp beauty in surviving something awful and learning how to be soft again. There’s power in finding your way back to yourself through therapy and friendship and laughter and fiction written under a secret pen name. There’s resilience in holding joy while still remembering pain.

There’s healing in telling the truth.

And so that’s what this book is. A truth told out loud. A story of fear and waiting, of institutions and intuition, of the systems that failed and the people who saved us.

Of long nights and harder mornings.

Of diagnoses spoken in hallways and prayers whispered in bathrooms.

Of the words “brainstem tumour” and the day they stopped being our full story.

This book ends in the present. But the story goes on. Because Evelyn is here. And she’s growing up. And I’m still learning how to live with the fear without letting it steer the wheel.

The final chapter is not an ending.

It’s an act of resistance.

Of choosing to speak. Of choosing to write. Of choosing, still, to believe in light.

And of holding close the truth I come back to again and again:

She stayed.

And so did I.