"With incredible kindness Pinky Swear responded with a generous donation that helped to keep our home and prevented us from incurring additional debt. We felt such immense relief, it was like coming up for air after being knocked down by a wave in the ocean. We will never be able to completely repay the kindness that has been shown to our family by Pinky Swear, but from the bottoms of our hearts, we thank you and vow to pay it forward forever.” 

It was October 2020, and Kira noticed that the corner of Eli’s eye was swollen. Eli was prescribed an antibiotic. She half-jokingly said, “This isn’t a brain tumor or anything, right?”

“Us cancer moms, we lose everybody but we need support. People don’t understand because he looks so good, I think, it doesn’t matter how he looks, he is going to die unless he gets the treatment he needs.”

For the first seven or eight months, Terrance and Terrayah were back and forth to the hospital almost every day. There were constant tests and procedures, and sadly the tumor was growing fast. There was never any set schedule, but a 20-minute drive each way clocked the miles up on Terrance’s car, and there were frequent visits to the gas station.

Then, late in 2020, Robert’s doctors decided to give him a chemo treatment meant for adults. He was the first child in the USA to take this medicine and, to his family’s amazement, he did a complete 360. He improved in three days, was out of the ICU, and his host versus graft disease was gone.

Once she was done with treatment, Maiya’s appointments went on another 1 ½ years. The family was going back and forth sometimes several times a week, driving 45 mins to an hour each way. There were labs and physical therapy; it was one test after another. Life was still far from normal.

Kylie had Acute Myeloid Leukemia and started on five rounds of chemotherapy. For the first round, they spent about one month in the hospital. Then, they got to go home in between rounds of chemo forever watchful of Kylie’s immune system, which meant that she was susceptible to infection at any time.

Just four months after Allison’s diagnosis, Karen’s mom diagnosed with lung cancer in December 2019, and she passed away only one month later. She was living in California, so Karen so trying to travel back and forth from Chicago at the same time as Allison was sick and her husband was in El Salvador.

Seven months into this journey, her family has realized the huge positive impact and support offered by having a community that understands the difficult aspects of having a child with cancer, and her mom, Lynnie, has also begun to connect with groups outside of the hospital.