Cassandra had been complaining for a month of pain in her left knee while sleeping at night. I brought this to the attention of her pediatrician at a well-child visit. The doctor looked her over and said that it was probably growing pains, and to elevate her leg in the evening and see if that might help. Following his advice, I began to elevate her leg at night with a pillow—a practice that my mother used when I had similar pains in my legs as a child. This didn’t help alleviate the pain, though, and in fact, it seemed to intensify as days went by. One week later we were at a local coffee shop and Cassandra had to go to the bathroom. I went in with her, and while I was helping her with her tights I noticed a large lump on her left buttock.

I called a dear friend who had graduated from being our babysitter during her four years of college to her current status as second-year medical student. I told her I needed to do some research, listed Joseph’s symptoms, told her what the ophthalmologist said, then asked about tumors in the eye area. She opened her cancer book and under orbital tumors found a word—a cancer—I’d never heard of before. “Okay,” she said, “this is the most common orbital tumor in children, it causes ptosis (drooping eye) and proptosis (protruding eye), hits kids most commonly between the ages of 2 and 6, is more common in boys than in girls, and is highly malignant.”

As she described these symptoms, she was literally describing Joseph’s face. She spelled the word out for me, and I still have the piece of paper on which I took those notes, on which I first wrote the word “rhabdomyosarcoma.”

The pediatrician looked concerned as she examined Cassandra and told me that it was some type of “mass.” I didn’t think the word “cancer” at all. She made an appointment for her to see a surgeon at Children’s Hospital later that afternoon. I knew that this was something serious, but had no idea just how bad until later that evening when the surgeon gave me the results of the CT scan [computerized tomography scan]: cancer in her left buttock, with metastatic lesions in her lungs. When I heard this news, I was reeling. My sister had died just 2 years before of breast cancer, and my younger brother had just finished treatment for testicular cancer. I thought, “This can’t be happening again!”