Until Tomorrow....

14 weeks ago I sat here, at my computer, and I stared for a long time while I tried to work out how to ask for help, how to ask my friends and family to pray for my baby girl as we faced the most difficult path we had ever traveled, a diagnosis of cancer.

Now I find myself in much the same position.

On Tuesday Nicola had an MRI to restage her cancer.

Tomorrow we get the results.

To say that I am scared is an understatement. I am totally, utterly and completely terrified.

I am so afraid that they will tell me that the chemo hasn't worked or that the tumor hasn't responded or that we have no more options.

I know it probably sounds silly to think these thoughts, especially when we have not been officially given the results yet, but there are a few things that I do know.

1. Healthy children with a stage 4 Embryonal Rhabdomyosarcoma have less than a 20% five year survival rate.

2. Even with all treatment options available today, metastasized cancer is rarely curable.

3. Children with Costello Syndrome and childhood cancer are more likely to die than survive.

I feel positively anxious about what is going to be said. I keep going through making lists of what I need to ask the oncologist when I speak to him, but then I get to a point and the questions just all seem to hard, and deep down I don't really want to know the answers at all. I still want this all to just be a bad dream and I'm going to wake up one day soon and it will never have happened and my baby will be ok.

I have spent most of the day walking around in a total funk. We got home last night.

She had her radiation planning yesterday, and when I was sitting in the waiting room waiting for her, I looked around and it occurred to me that everyone else that was there for treatment was old. (It was at the adults hospital)

I can't explain it, but it really just struck me that Nicola didn't deserve to be there. None of them did, no one deserves a diagnosis of cancer, but to see my beautiful, precious little three year old daughter in amongst all the much, much, much older people there for treatment, it just seemed to very very wrong.

But, regardless of how wrong it feels, it is happening, and it is happening at an alarming rate. Having flown home last night, we have until Monday morning to organise everything for us to fly back down to Brisbane again for her to start radiation therapy.

To be honest, I'm not sure which is going to be worse... seeing my baby suffer through 6 weeks of daily anesthetics and radiation therapy, or being away from the rest of my family for so long.

We had briefly contemplated tag teaming so we could take turns at being down there and up here, to break up and make it a bit easier, but the cost of the flights alone are so prohibitive that it makes it impossible for us to even truly consider, especially on top of everything else.

But I guess at the end of the day we do what we have to do, and if that means I have to be away from my beautiful children and my husband for the better part of two months to give Nicola any kind of chance at beating this, then I have to do it, there is absolutely no doubt at all about that.

But, until tomorrow it is all irrelevant. Until tomorrow we don't know for sure what will be happening or what next week will hold, we won't know anything...

All we can to is wait...

Until tomorrow.