Meet Audrey

It started with terrible headaches during a spring break trip when Audrey was eight years old.

“My parents thought it was just altitude sickness and kept an eye on me,” she told us. But she wasn’t able to even keep water down. “I wasn’t a very dramatic kid so my parents knew something was up after a few days. We went home early. They called doctor after doctor until one finally agreed to get me an MRI at a faraway hospital.”

Audrey remembers that they had to leave early in the morning and that the sounds of the MRI machine made her head throb. So did the ambulance. She was diagnosed with a germinoma brain tumor.

“I remember being in a hospital bed as my mother cried and my dad tried to explain what a brain tumor was to an eight-year-old,” Audrey remembers. “He said there was a lump in my head the size of a ketchup cup. Bigger than a ketchup packet, those paper ketchup cups…”

She remembers being trapped in bed for a week, and she remembers visitors coming and going.

“I never realized until I saw the pictures later that I had big machines running behind me, attached to my brain, keeping me alive,” she said. “My second-grade class sent me letters telling me to get better. I imagine the teacher explaining to the class why I was gone, having to tell a room of kids what cancer was. I hated knowing that they were talking about me. They drew pictures of me without hair and my dad had to explain to me why they did that.”

Audrey went through several surgeries, four rounds of chemo, and a month of radiation.

“During chemo, I felt sick all the time and my favorite foods made me nauseous. I refused to shave my hair so I let it fall out in chunks,” she said. But throughout it all, she stayed positive. She’d help the nurses take her temperature and draw her blood.

“As the treatment went on, it was easier to feel happy,” Audrey told us. “Seniors at the radiation center told my parents they don’t often see little girls skipping through the halls and it brought them joy. So I always skipped in the radiation center and I always smiled and said hi to the seniors.”

“When I was finally deemed cancer free, I got to ring the gong I had heard rung so many times before me and I got to start my new life.”