Chapter 5: past the point of maybe

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. We didn’t have a suitcase. We didn’t have a plan. But we had the kind of worry that makes your heart beat like a metronome. Not panic. Something quieter, heavier. The kind that anchors in your chest and won’t let go.

We were done waiting.

By that point, I had seen her eyes go lazy. I had watched her drift in and out of sleep like a boat slipping off its moorings. I had flown home from California in a fog of instinct and fear. I had cried in LAX. Cried in Chicago. Cried in the car on the way back from the airport. But what I hadn’t done—what no one had done—was say with authority: something is wrong.

Until we arrived at CHEO.

They didn’t send us home. That in itself felt like a verdict. We were seen by everyone—every doctor, every nurse, every passing professional whose badge had the authority to say yes, or no, or I’m not sure. A carousel of concern.

Dr. Zemek. Dr. Varshney. Dr. Zucker. Dr. Pothos. Names that will live in my body forever, even if I forget where I put my keys. They didn’t say the word cancer. Not yet. But they said admission. Which was its own kind of thunderclap.

It was a strategic move. They called it “getting the ball rolling faster.” If we were admitted, things would happen. Scans would get scheduled. Opinions would stack. Time, that slippery thief, would be slowed down—at least a little. Evelyn would be prioritized. I would stop being just a concerned mother. I would be the mother on the ward.

So we stationed ourselves in the emergency department as we went through test after test, scan after scan. I say we, because my mom never left. We unpacked diapers and onesies and hope and dread. We made ourselves small in a world that suddenly loomed so large—hallways filled with machines and whispers and the clicking of sneakers that knew where they were going.

Evelyn was still just seven months old. She didn’t understand the stakes. She only knew the fluorescent lights and the smell of rubbing alcohol and the way I held her tighter that day. She still smiled. She still found light, somehow.

But something had shifted. The system had absorbed our fear and named it: investigation. Which is how medicine acknowledges the fog.

From this moment forward, we were on a track—fast or slow, no one could say. But we were moving. And that was enough. For that Sunday, at least.

Because now, finally, we weren’t just waiting. We were in it.

* * * * *

By 9 p.m., they moved us from emergency to the ward in 5 East.

Hospitals have their own kind of darkness. Not pitch black—just dimmed. Lights at half-power. Machines blinking like tired eyes. Doors sighing open and closed. The kind of quiet that isn’t peaceful. The kind that hums with the things no one’s saying out loud.

My mom had left. She kissed Evelyn. Hugged me tight. Promised she’d be back first thing. Only one parent was allowed overnight in the hospital. And then she was gone, and I was standing alone in a semi-private room with a hospital bag that didn’t exist and a baby I couldn’t put down.

They showed me our “bed”—a padded recliner chair next to Evelyn’s crib. The kind of chair you can maybe sit in for an hour during visiting hours. Not sleep in. Not survive in. And not breastfeed from while holding a seven-month-old with a broken brain.

The crib looked too big for her. Cold. Metal bars. A white sheet folded with hospital corners like we were checking into a hotel run by ghosts.

She wouldn’t sleep there. I wouldn’t let her.

She was curled into my chest like a second heartbeat, and I couldn’t feel where she ended and I began. Her body was soft, warm, heavy with whatever was still unfolding inside her skull. I knew she didn’t understand where we were. But her eyes told me she understood enough to be afraid.

I looked around the room. There was a teen boy behind the curtain. A quiet shuffle. Earbuds maybe. No words.

And then I broke.

I walked out into the hallway holding Evelyn, and I started to cry. Not a pretty cry. Not the kind of cry you can cover with a tissue and a deep breath. I was sobbing. Shoulders shaking. Mouth open. The kind of crying that pulls your face into something unfamiliar.

I stopped a nurse—her name was Jessica, I think—and asked if she could help make the chair recline. I couldn’t figure it out. I couldn’t do one more thing. I was holding a sick baby, and I had no clothes, no toothbrush, no food, no plan, and no place to sleep. My body was screaming for a horizontal surface. My arms were screaming for rest. But Evelyn wouldn’t be put down. She couldn’t be put down.

“I can’t,” I said to the nurse. “I can’t put her in the crib. She’ll wake up. She’ll cry. She’s not okay. She needs to be on me. She’s only okay when she’s on me.”

She nodded. Softly. Quietly. She helped me lean the chair back. Brought me an extra blanket. Didn’t tell me the rules about co-sleeping or safety or what was technically allowed. She just saw me. A mother in a hallway. A baby asleep on her chest. Both of us wrecked.

I sat down. Cradled Evelyn tighter. Adjusted my shirt so she could latch if she needed. Pulled the blanket over both of us. Rested my head against the chair’s vinyl seam and stared into the ceiling like it might give me an answer.

I closed my eyes. Didn’t sleep.

There are nights you survive that don’t feel survivable at the time. This was one of them.

Nothing was fixed.

Nothing was diagnosed.

No one had said the word tumor.

But everything in my body knew: we were past the point of maybe.

This wasn’t precaution anymore.

This was the long haul.