It is that they are steady. With medicine, community, and stubborn love, they will keep showing up for this little girl until she comes home healthy and stays there. She still remembers the call. Her husband had run out for diapers for their toddler granddaughter, and the house was busy and loud. Then the phone rang. Their daughter asked if everyone was together. Her stomach dropped. A moment later, the words landed. It is leukemia. She screamed no and fell to her knees while her other kids held her up. Every hard memory from her mother’s years with lymphoma rushed back. She could not even say the word to her husband when he returned. Their oldest daughter had to hear the diagnosis alone in an ER room because of pandemic rules, while her husband waited in the parking lot. It felt like the past had come back to crush them.
They chose to share the news publicly. Not for attention, but because cancer had already taught them that numbers are people, and that families can feel very alone. Infant leukemia is rare. Only a few hundred babies a year get it. Yet somewhere, a parent hears the exact shattering words every few minutes. During a pandemic, text chains were impossible. Social media became their lifeline. Messages came from strangers on other continents. Gifts arrived. Comments lifted them on days they could not lift themselves. They did not have a big local support team. They had ten of them in the family, and that was it. So they stayed home, skipped restaurants and stores, and guarded their health to swap nights at the hospital, keep Big Sister on weekends, and give the baby’s parents a little rest. Most of them started therapy. The weight was heavy, and they needed help carrying it.
Faith also felt complicated. People told them God would heal the baby. They thought about how many children they had watched die on the oncology floor, and how they had prayed for seven years for her mother’s cure that never came. They believe in God. They believe in science. They believe both can be true and that babies still die from cancer. So they decided to trust the fight they saw in their granddaughter and her team’s skill, and to keep showing up every day. By eleven months old, she had been through seven rounds of chemo, with one more before transplant.
She spent her first Thanksgiving and Christmas inpatient. Her first birthday would be in the hospital, too. She had multiple lines placed, T cells collected, CAR T therapy using her own cells, bone marrow biopsies, lumbar punctures, and endless tests. She battled cytokine storms with fevers that soared, tremors, crying that would not stop, and days too weak to eat. Watching that was the hardest thing so far.
And yet the most significant battle is still ahead. Four days before she turns one, she will receive stem cells from a stranger. They will wipe out her bone marrow to make room for the new cells and then wait in the hollow space for engraftment, when healthy cells grow. There will be weeks with no immune system. There will be fear they can name and fear they cannot. An entire room will be full of people watching for a small signal that says the new life has taken root. Until then, they will remain a family of ten doing the work. The grandmother will stay well to take the night shift and nap with the parents. The grandfather will keep making sleepovers fun for Big Sister.
The parents will keep doing the most demanding job two people can do. The doctors and nurses will keep leading. The online friends will keep cheering from time zones away. And they will keep loving a baby who has lived through more than most adults. They are anxious about what can go wrong. They are hopeful this could be the cure. They are grateful for a donor they may never meet. Mostly, they are fierce for a child who deserves a long life without tubes and alarms. Their love is not a slogan. It is a quiet decision to hold on.
