When I first started working at Arnold Palmer Hospital, always the youngest on the team has to take call over Christmas. So, on Christmas Eve, I got called because there was a young girl, four years old, who came in to the emergency room the night before with vomiting, and headaches, and trouble walking. And when we did some MRIs of her brain, she was found to have a brain tumor.
And I remember going into the family's room on the 24th of December to have to tell them that their daughter had a brain tumor, and that it was a malignant cancerous brain tumor. And I'll never forget that the dad said to me, he said, "Will I ever get to walk my daughter in her wedding?" I said to him at that point, I said, "I don't know, but we're gonna try damn hard to make that happen." She had three surgeries to remove the tumor, because it kept growing back. She underwent chemotherapy for over a year and a half.
She's been off her therapy now for six months. And you know, she's actually doing great. She doesn't have any evidence of the tumor whatsoever. She's back in school, happy, playful. And I remember that I told the father, I said, "The only thing I've ever wanted is to be able to go to her wedding one day." He told me a couple of weeks ago that he was planning to have me walk her.