Every Day for Eva

Eva Baker - the fun-loving 8-year-old daughter of Hilary and Ken Baker, twin sister to Daniel Baker and niece to Kevin and Lauren Baker has recently had her world turned upside down.

A note from Hilary, Eva's mom:

At the end of January, Eva started not feeling well. At first, I was thinking she had a touch of the flu. A few days later she was holding her head and crying…migraine? We tried to treat it for a couple of days, but still no improvement. We went to the clinic and she did have a sinus infection so antibiotics seemed to be the next step. She finished those and the sinus infection cleared up, but she was still not back to herself.

We went back in for blood work, a urine sample, and tried to do IV fluids in the clinic but Eva was not super cooperative with the needle. All blood work/urine came back normal. She was still so out of it that Thursday evening I took her to the ER to get fluids and they did more blood work. Everything came back normal again however she was still not feeling like herself. We went back to the ER Friday for fluids and migraine help. More fluids, some pain meds , and a scheduled MRI.

Saturday the waves of headaches were constant. She was miserable. I was about to head back to the ER when I noticed her tense up and her right hand was curling in…turns out she was having a seizure. We called 911 and had an ambulance ride to the ER. She had at least one more seizure when we got to the ER. They did a CT scan which showed a mass in/near the thalamus of her brain.

Within an hour we were in a helicopter heading to Children’s Hospital Milwaukee. Within a couple hours of arriving in Milwaukee she was in for surgery to put drainage tubes in her head to relieve the fluid/pressure.

She had an MRI the following morning to get a better idea of what we were dealing with. This led to a 6-hour surgery on Monday to remove as much of the tumor as possible. She did great in and after surgery.

Dr. Kim said they think they got 70-80 percent of it out. The tumor was not attached to the memory section of her brain and her right-side motor functions were good.

She had an MRI on Tuesday to see how everything looked now. It was like it was never there - the Dr's were amazing.

Then came Wednesday-Valentine’s Day: The day we heard from pathology .

Eva has been diagnosed with Pediatric high-grade glioma that is rapid growing. If they can’t remove all of the cancerous tissue (which they couldn’t - at least not yet) the normal life expectancy for this type of caner with treatment is 1-5 years. This is not the news we wanted or expected.

Radiation will start as soon as we possibly can (waiting for her head to heal a bit from her recent surgery) as well as chemo.

Please pray for sweet Eva and our family.