The baby was actually delivered almost perfectly, but nobody had noticed that something was going on in this young woman’s body. She was barely twenty-one at the time, alone, and she had traveled from a country in war to the promised land to become a single mother.
The shock came only slightly later.
In the first months of her mothership in the promised land, she was the happiest mom in the world (although she mourned the father of her baby, who had fallen just like so many others).
Finally, there was a chance. Finally, there was a future.
And then she noticed some blood in her pee, and although she wanted to dismiss the red clouds amongst the clearest skies in her young life, she knew that the constant pain might not be a coincidence after all.
So she sought for an opinion, and not much later she got it. And now she was a mother with cancer, and the Sun stopped shining altogether (because this cancer was bad).
And time and again, the young mother walked to the urologist’s office in the hope to (finally) hear some good news, but without an exception, the news got worse. First there was the kidney cancer (removal), then there was a cancerous lymph node mass (removal), then new cancerous lymph node growth (removal), and then even worse.
The baby had not even reached the age of one when the cancerous mass had grown into the vena cava — a large vein which carries blood to the heart from other parts of the body — of the mother whom she would never really know.
Because the cancer was literally strangling the way to her mom’s heart.
And the struggle would be over soon.
SOURCES: Head, shoulder and back of an écorché figure, seen from behind, with the arteries and blood vessels indicated in red. Colored lithograph by J. Roux, 1822. Wellcome Collection. (© public domain)