I’m sitting in a hospital room that has become our entire world. The only sound is the rhythmic, relentless beep of the heart monitor, a sound I’ve come to both despise and pray for. My son, my little Chris-Neymar, is sleeping, but it isn’t sleep. It’s a fitful, pained oblivion, and it’s the only escape he gets from the inferno his body has become.

His body is “literally burning with fire.”

That’s what the doctors said, and it’s the awful, terrifying truth. I can feel the heat radiating from his small body, even from a foot away. His skin is flushed a painful, angry red. We just finished eight sessions of a punishing, scorched-earth radiotherapy. We knew it would be hard. We knew it would be a fight. We steeled ourselves for nausea, for exhaustion, for tears.

We were not prepared for this.

He is drowning in the aftermath. The fever spikes to unimaginable numbers, the ones that make the nurses’ eyes go wide before they force a professional calm. The chills wrack his tiny frame, shaking the entire gurney. A deep, guttural moan escapes him when he’s conscious, a sound that will haunt my nightmares for the rest of my life. He’s terrified. He’s in agony. He’s shrinking before my eyes, the small amount of weight he’d gained vanishing, leaving him frail and ghostly. The sedatives they give him barely touch the sides of his pain. He just cries, a heartbreaking, weak wail that pleads, “Make it stop.”

We have supported him. We have been his rock. We have sung to him, read to him, held his hand, and whispered that he is strong, that he is a warrior. But I confess, in the sterile silence of 3 AM, we are all breaking. The psychological toll is a monster in the room with us, invisible and suffocating. But we have to fight. We have to. For him.

And then, just as I thought we couldn’t possibly endure another blow, the truly worst part revealed itself. Not another complication. Not another infection.

An email. A bill. The cold, hard, numerical truth that we have no more money.

The next cycle of chemotherapy, the very thing that stands between him and this relentless monster, is scheduled. The cost is beyond us. We have exhausted every avenue, drained every account, sold what we could, and begged from every friend and family member. We are empty.

We have survived cancer. We have survived a relapse. We have survived a war. And now, I’m sitting in this chair, watching my son burn, and I am terrified we will be defeated by an invoice.

It’s paralyzing. The injustice is so profound it chokes me. But I know I can’t be paralyzed. I have to fight. To do that, I have to go back. I have to make you understand how we got here, how a normal family can find themselves in an international nightmare, begging for their child’s life.

It was February 5, 2024. A day like any other, normal and beautifully boring. I’d just gotten home from work, the familiar relief of kicking off my shoes at the door. Chris, my beautiful, energetic boy, ran to me for his hug, his laughter the best sound in the world. I scooped him up, my face buried in his hair, breathing in that perfect little-boy smell.

And that’s when I felt it.

It wasn’t a bump. It wasn’t a bruise. It was a thing. A hard, unmoving, alien mass under the skin of his perfect little belly.

My blood turned to ice. Every sound in the house—the TV, the refrigerator’s hum, the distant traffic—went silent. I looked at my husband, and he didn’t even need to ask. He saw it on my face. My breath hitched. Chris, sensing my panic, started to cry, uncomfortable and fussy. My hands were shaking so badly I could barely hold him. We called for an ambulance.

The minutes stretched into agonizing, surreal hours. The ambulance ride, the siren wailing for my son. The rush into the ER, the blur of doctors and nurses. Their questions were a buzz I couldn’t understand. I just held his hand, my knuckles white. I remember their faces, the way they tried to look calm for us but their eyes were full of urgency and a pity that terrified me. From their reactions, we knew. We knew before they ever said the words.

It took a few days for the official confirmation, a few days of holding our breath until our lungs burned. But it came like a freight train, leveling our entire world: Nephroblastoma. Kidney cancer.

The world doesn’t just change in that moment. It shatters. It splits cleanly in two: the “before,” a life that was warm and full of color, and the “after,” a cold, sterile, terrifying void. There is no greater fear on this earth than being told you might lose your child. That cancer, a word that belongs to other people, to strangers, to sad stories on the internet, might steal the most precious thing in your life.

The grief is absolute. It’s a physical weight that pushes you to the floor. It’s a paralysis. But it only lasts a moment. Because then, the adrenaline comes. The fight. Because for your child, you will do anything. You will walk through fire. You will burn the world down.

We never left the hospital.

The battle began immediately. A grueling regimen of chemotherapy designed to shrink the tumor, to make it operable. Seeing that poison drip into my son’s veins was a violation of every maternal instinct. It made him so, so sick. But we held his hand, we caught the vomit in a bowl, and we told him he was brave.

The doctors then began preparing for surgery. The goal was to remove the tumor, but the cost was horrific: they would have to take his entire kidney with it. We signed the papers in a daze.

The day of the surgery, I handed my child over to a team of strangers, my heart tearing out of my chest. The hours in the waiting room were the longest of our lives. My husband and I just sat, silent, unable to speak, intermittently weeping.

The news came. The surgery was “very difficult.” Chris was in the ICU.

We ran. What we saw… it wasn’t our son. It was a small body, pale and still, lost in a tangle of tubes and wires, the ventilator breathing for him. He was fighting for his life. He couldn’t eat. He couldn’t drink. He was agitated, nervous, and when he was briefly awake, he just cried. My heart was breaking into a million pieces. I wanted to take his pain, to trade places with him, but I couldn’t. All I could do was watch. My husband and I took shifts, a constant, desperate vigil by his crib.

For four days, we lived in that hell. Four days of watching monitors, praying for numbers to change. And then, slowly… he improved. He fought. Our little warrior fought his way back.

A new phase began. More chemotherapy. Six long, brutal months of fighting. It was hard. There were days we thought we couldn’t go on. But we believed. We had to believe we would win.

On September 19, we heard the three most beautiful words in the English language: “It is clean.”

Remission. The nightmare was over. We wept, but this time, the tears were of a relief so profound it was almost painful. We had won. Our son had won.

Life rushed back in. We brought our new baby daughter home, a tiny symbol of hope and new beginnings. Chris, now with his sister, was a new boy. We decorated the Christmas tree together, the lights sparkling in his wide, happy eyes. We celebrated the New Bleeping Year. We even took a trip to the sea, a family whole and healed. We were so happy, so grateful, so utterly naive. We thought the worst was behind us.

Five months. We got five months of peace.

Then, I noticed it. The subtle shift. He didn’t want to eat his favorite foods. When he wasn’t sleeping, he was crying, that same high-pitched, insistent cry of pain I thought I’d never hear again. I saw him suffering, and the old, cold dread crept back into my heart.

We went to the hospital. “It’s probably just a bug,” the nurse said. They ran some tests and told us to wait for the results.

The next day, the phone rang. It was his oncologist. His voice was flat, professional, and it terrified me. “We see a change in his lung,” he said. “You need to come in immediately.”

To say the world collapsed in that moment is to say nothing at all. The world, our hard-won, beautiful world, evaporated. A relapse. In his lung. In less than six months.

We knew what that meant. The statistics for relapses, especially so soon, are a death sentence. We knew the situation wasn’t just bad. It was “very, very bad.”

They rushed him into an emergency operation to remove part of his lung. The doctors were stark. He was a “very severe case.” The risk of more relapses was incredibly high. The protocol they had used, the one that should have worked, had failed.

We were out of options in our home country. But I would not give up.

Frantic, sleepless nights of research led me to a single thread of hope. A children’s hospital in Israel, a place that treats the most difficult oncology cases. Their numbers were staggering: a 95% survival rate for nephroblastoma.

Ninety-five percent. That was his chance. That was our only chance.

The decision was instant. The logistics were a nightmare. The plan was for my husband to fly to Israel with Chris immediately. I would stay behind with our other two children. The idea of splitting our family, of sending my sick son and my husband into the unknown, was agonizing.

Then, the unthinkable. On June 13, war broke out with Iran.

Chris was already in Israel with his dad. He was in a terrible state, and a new infection had ravaged his weakened body. I was at home, thousands of miles away, frantic, watching the news as rockets flew.

My husband called. The hospital was moving patients. They were in a bomb shelter. My critically ill son was in a bomb shelter in a hospital, in a warzone.

All flights were canceled. I was trapped. I was screaming. Was this how it would end? After all this, would I lose my husband and my son to a missile? I was going insane with fear, with helplessness.

When the immediate situation calmed, I made my choice. I was done being helpless. Chris needed his mother. He needed his family.

I packed our lives into suitcases. I took my other two children, one of them just a baby, and I flew into a foreign country in the middle of a conflict, with no knowledge of the language, no friends, no support system.

People thought we were insane. But we are not afraid of the war. We are not afraid of the bombs. We are afraid of only one thing: that the cancer will win.

Here, in Israel, they gave us a new plan. A 12-month brutalist assault. Eight courses of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. We held onto that 95% number like a religious text. We were ready.

Which brings us back to today.

Back to this room. Back to my son “burning with fire” from the radiation. Back to the sedatives that don’t work and the fear in his eyes.

And back to the invoice.

We have come so far. We have fought so hard. My son has endured more pain than most adults will ever know. He is a warrior. He talks about what he wants to be when he grows up. He loves excavators, tractors, cranes, and bulldozers. He tells us he’s going to build houses.

He has to grow up to do that. And to grow up, he has to live.

I sit here every night, watching him, hiding my tears because I must be strong for him. But I am not hiding them from you. Every moment is fear. Every night is a prayer for just one more day.

I am begging you. Please, help me fight for my child’s life. We cannot do this alone anymore. The fight has drained us, and the cost has broken us. Only with you do we have a chance. Every dollar, every share, every prayer is a breath of life for my son.

Please. Help him live