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Mia’s Story

Mia is the daughter of my wife best friend’s Camm and she is a single mother. Mia and I bonded immediately. I remember humming music from Zelda to her while I prepped her bottle. It’s unfortunate her birth father isn’t around much, so I was at father's day events, picking her up from school when Camm couldn’t, and the best days we would spend the whole day together and order a heart shaped pizza.

It started when Mia had a pain in her abdomen. The doctors at the hospital pushed her stomach around and said they wanted ultrasounds. Everything seemed to be fine and fun until the mood of ultrasound tech changed. She stopped chatting. The doc came in and asked us to go to a small room. That’s where Camm was told that Mia had a mass in her abdomen consistent with a tumor and she would be transferred to SickKids. From that moment things started to move very quickly.

It’s around this moment when we started panicking. This is one of those things that you think only happens to other people, you never feel as though it’s going to happen to you. They hadn’t told us much yet, and we were still hopeful.

For the next while, it was a lot of tests, it was so surreal. This is Mia. The little girl I’d do anything for, the Father’s Day celebrations I’ve been to, the Christmas mornings, and the emails I send her telling her how special she is. She has Cancer. The only things going through my mind was an irrational anger and fear. Now it was late hospital stays, and overnights at the Ronald McDonald house within the SickKids, swapping nights so that Camm could go sleep in a real bed, and so that Sarah, and myself could do the same.

Finally, we got the news of the type of cancer — Stage 4m Neuroblastoma (or L2 depending on the scale). The hope of a super treatable cancer was gone. 18 months of treatment. You don’t “cure” cancer, you kill everything, and hope to outlast it. We were doing this to Mia. She was going to grow up a lot faster and lose a small amount of her innocence as a result. But what helped us was her. Her happy, playful, smarmy self. Rolling her eyes at me if I made a lame joke, mimicking the things Sarah would say, or telling her mom she was making a big deal out of nothing. We talked about all the people in the city one night, about how all the windows were people, and how they resembled stars. That’s what really helped as well as why it hurt. When Mia has a tough day, she takes a deep breathe and tries to remember what we told her. We explained what being brave was; it’s not the absence of fear, but knowing that fear and facing it head on.

The help also came in the form of our circle of Family and Friends. Camm being a solo parent means that there is no reprieve. Camm tries. She’s amazing at what she does. The work it takes to be a solo parent is a lot. Well worth the work, but a lot of it. She does it, and she is great at it.

I’m not sure how to leave you on a good note. I will say this. Mia is brave, wonderful, and beautiful, she is clever, she is funny, she is loving, she is dainty, she is a princess, she is Monkey, she is Bearner, Kidlette and Midlette. She is an inspiration to me to be a better person. She isn’t cancer, she is Mia.