Abigail's Brain Tumor Removal and Cancer Treatment

Hello, my name is Madelyn, and I am Abigail's mama.

At the end of January, we noticed Abigail started to have a slight tremor on her right hand. As the days went on, we noticed the tremor increasing and spreading to her right leg. We went to her pediatrician, who put in a referral for an MRI, which we scheduled for the end of February. As we were getting closer to that day, she was getting worse; her balance was getting worse. We decided to bring her into Randall's Emergency Room on February 18th. We were almost immediately admitted to stay the night and the next day, they planned on the MRI.

On February 19th, we received the worst news of our lives. She had an incredibly large tumor that was starting to run out of room. They transported us that night to Doernbecher and into the PICU. The next day, they did another MRI of her head as well as her spine. Thankfully the tumor had not gone to the spine. The following day she underwent an angiogram to see if they could plug any of the blood vessels that were feeding the tumor. They could not, but because of that procedure, the surgeon had a clearer map of how the tumor was being fed by her blood vessels.

The next morning, February 22nd, Abigail went under for more than 14 hours, 12 of those being the procedure of removing as much as the brain tumor as possible. The surgeon was able to remove 98% of the tumor and had to leave the 2% because it was too intertwined with other important parts of the brain. Because of how vascular the tumor was, she had to undergo a blood transfusion in the midst of surgery, and we are forever grateful for the person who donated their blood to save our daughter. We are thankful for the neurosurgery team who saved our daughter's precious life. We asked what the level of emergency we were at; we were at days, not hours, but days.

Our strong girl just came home from a 9-day hospital stay. We are recovering while we wait for the pathology reports as to what we are dealing with. We are currently doing physical therapy to regain her strength and walk without hindrance. We are not sure what the future holds, but we are holding onto hope and peace for our girl. We will adjust the goal amount as we know more about the current hospital bill and potential future treatment. We are continually praying for a miracle and that she fully recovers.