My Five Year Old Daughter May Have a Brain Tumor

It is 1:30 a.m. and I jolt out of bed. Day four has passed since we learned our five year old Hannah has an abnormal MRI result. MRI stands for magnetic resonance imaging, a scan often used to indicate brain abnormalities. Hannah and Owen both underwent an MRI on the same day and neither was completely normal. Owen's result was something called a chiari 1. Hannah's result remains unknown but it isn't good.

I bound out of my fitful sleep of dreaming someone pops into the night and takes my youngest child, my baby girl. It seems a cruel twist of fate that last week I was ready to say goodbye to my experiences at St. Jude Hospital only to learn this week if my child has cancer we could be returning for her. Hannah seems so normal. Despite some slight delays from Cowden Syndrome, she has been blossoming lately. Her newest activity is learning to read and she is taking to it like it is second nature.

Yesterday Hannah's geneticist returned my call saying there is a small area of change near her corpus callosum. She will soon undergo another scan to see if contrast dye is able to make the small spot more clear. If not, the plan is to watch and be certain the spot does not grow. Watching or surgery is our only two choices.

I try to hold it together around Hannah and Owen. Being five and seven, anything medical has to scare them. My mind jumps to the best possible case-a fuzzy scan that will show nothing next time. I pray for a mistake. There seems to be no middle ground as my mind flies to the "what ifs?" The spot is located in her corpus callosum where a lot of important brain functions occur. It seems unfair to think she could one day have brain surgery when she has caught up on her delayed motor and cognitive skills. Four months ago my mom died of colon cancer, a month ago my mother-in-law had a brain aneurysm removed, and now my little girl could have a brain tumor.

I want to shout at God that I'm not Job from the Bible and he can cut it out now yet I know God is why I have been Hannah's mom for almost six years. God has always been with me but it is more difficult to feel this time. My little Hannah is a stickler for prayer. If I forget prayers she always reminds me. She has the books of the bible memorized even though she cannot read. Her bright brown eyes reflect a love of life I'm unsure I ever had. My Hannah-named that for Hannah in the Bible who thought she would be unable to have children. I believed the same due to ovarian cancer twice before the age of 16.

I was at St. Jude during the week of Read across America and Dr. Seuss' birthday. Lines from "Oh the Places You'll Go" kept entering my mind as I waited for scanning and the results of my children's scans. While I was pregnant with Owen, I read this book to him each day so the words were still there.

You can get so confused
that you'll start in to race
down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace
and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space,
headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.
The Waiting Place ...

...for people just waiting.
Waiting for a train to go
or a bus to come, or a plane to go
or the mail to come, or the rain to go---etc.

The book follows with escaping all the "waiting and staying" then finding the bright places "where boom bands are playing." I wanted my children to escape the waiting due to medical problems but at the current time life has other plans. I comfort myself with knowing they have mom to wait with them.

My time online will be limited as we cope with this unexpected issue.