Chapter 4: to trust my mom instinct

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.

 She couldn’t open them fully anymore. She had started blinking slowly, heavily, like it took real effort. Her head leaned more than usual. And one of her eyes—her left—had started drifting. Not subtly. Not like a newborn still figuring out her focus. This was lazy, unmistakably so. It wasn’t occasional. It was sudden. And it was constant.

Something had changed.

We were still in L.A., still visiting family, still pretending we were in the afterglow of a “normal” trip. But Halloween broke the illusion. We knew we had to get help.

We took Evelyn to a children’s hospital in Los Angeles. Told them she’d had a shunt placed in Canada. Told them about the sleepiness, the heaviness, the eye. They paged neurosurgery. And again, for the second time in a week, I was standing next to an MRI machine, holding my baby, agreeing to another rapid scan.

It was another FIESTA.

No sedation. No prep. Just me, Evelyn, a swaddle, and that low hum of urgency. I held her while the machine pulled her in. I kept my hand on her ankle the whole time. I tried to tell myself this was precautionary. That this wasn’t what it looked like. That the scan would give us an answer.

It didn’t.

The images showed no obvious problem. No change in the shunt. No signs of pressure. No tumor. They told us the next step might be to see an ophthalmologist. Or… they said, with careful language, maybe go back to Canada where she’s known and her medical history is deeper. Maybe someone there can follow up.

I nodded. Took Evelyn. Left. Sat on the couch at my in-laws’ house in Long Beach.

And then I started crying.

Not like “overwhelmed new mom” crying. Not like “tired on vacation” crying. I mean the kind of crying that happens when the floor has fallen out of the world and you don’t know what you’re standing on anymore.

My sister-in-law validated me. She said I should trust my mom instinct—no matter what anyone else said.

So I called the after-hours ophthalmologist line. One of those hospital systems with too many numbers. Press 2 for administration. Press 3 for non-urgent advice. Press 4 if your child’s eye is going wrong in real time and you’re holding her and no one believes you.

I pressed for emergency.

The voice on the other end was clipped. Annoyed. She was probably about to go home. Probably didn’t want to be paged in the middle of the night by a crying woman from another country who didn’t have an appointment.

But I broke down mid-sentence. Told her the story. The shunt. The sleep. The scan. The eye. And somewhere in the middle of my mess, her voice changed. The annoyance disappeared.

“A baby’s eyes don’t just go lazy like that,” she said.

“Something is wrong. You need to get on a plane home now. You need to find out what this is.”

That’s when I knew it was real.

That this was the moment.

That we were done pretending.

I called the airline. Changed my ticket. Booked the next flight home.

John and Emma drove me and Evelyn to LAX. We didn’t say much.

In the chaos of departures, we hugged in a cluster—me, John, Emma, Evelyn pressed to my chest. I was crying. John was crying. Emma was crying. Evelyn was still. None of us understood what the hell was happening, but we all felt it.

Something was terribly wrong.

And I left them there. At departures before security. And I took the escalator up into security at LAX holding a baby who no longer blinked properly, whose eye wouldn’t track, and who had just passed through her second MRI in seven days with no answers.

The flight home was a kind of pilgrimage. I was alone with a seven month old baby. I left almost everything behind with John and just traveled with a stroller and a small bag.

LAX to Chicago. Then Chicago to Ottawa.

I don’t remember what gate I was at. I only remember the weight of the stroller and trying to fold it with one hand. The people who helped me lift my bags. The woman in the aisle seat who handed me a tissue wordlessly.

I cried, mostly silently, for hours.

I wasn’t scared of flying. I was scared of what I was flying toward.

A lady next to me saw Evelyn and said, “what a good baby—she looks so sleepy.”

Not sleepy, I thought. Sick.

When we landed back home in the middle of the night, my parents were there to meet me. My mom took one look at me and didn’t ask any questions. Just reached for the car seat, for my hand, for whatever part of me she could hold.

We went to the emergency department at the children’s hospital.

My mom came with me. Stayed with me. For a week.

John stayed in L.A. with Emma. We thought—naively, again—that maybe it was nothing. Maybe it would resolve. Maybe it was just something minor. A cranial nerve thing. An infection. A fluke. Why pay extra to change four tickets? They were coming home in a few days anyway. It would take time to figure this out.

But something in me already knew.

The eye wasn’t wrong by accident.

We had gone through the tunnel twice this past week.

And next time, we weren’t coming out the same.