DIPG. I had never heard of it. How did my child get this? He was healthy. Was it the food we fed him? Was it because he was born premature? Was it because we had him vaccinated? How had we never known of such a horrifice cancer that causes such a large amount of kids triumphant suffering until it became fatal? I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. It couldn’t be as bad as I read about, or I would have heard about it before. I would have known something about it. Did this cancer really kill almost 100% of it’s victims within 9 months? I knew of a cruel world, where there were people killed by drunk drivers, and shootings, even leukemia and spina bifida, or by suicide or heart attacks. I never imagined there was something like this that slowly takes away every function of a young child, their ability to walk and talk and eat, to breathe. Was this really happening? They had to be wrong. There was no cure? No treatment? Jason and I had talked right after finding out Payton had a “mass”(that’s all they told us the first night until the docs could meet with us the next day), and I told Jason “It’s going to be ok, they can probably do surgery to remove it”. I was scared, yes, but I was scares because I thought our baby might have to go through brain surgery, or that he might only live to his twenties or thirties. Finding out there was virtually nothing they could do was the most devastating thing I’ve ever heard.
Payton Strong 