We have until November.

That’s not a deadline for a project. It’s not a holiday we’re planning for. It’s an expiration date. It is the last day on a calendar of impossible choices, a line drawn in the sand by doctors who look at us with pity in their eyes. We have until November to save our daughter, Blanka.

Four years old. Our daughter is four years old. She should be learning to write her name, fighting with her big sister over a toy, and leaving cookie crumbs on the couch. And she was. Just a few months ago, Blanka was our spark. She was the laughter that filled our home, a whirlwind of energy, curiosity, and joy. She loved coloring, playing board games, and her favorite hero in the world was Kicia Kocia. Her 9-year-old sister, Liliana, was her guide, her protector, and her best friend.

We were a normal family. We were happy. We were, God help us, lucky. We had no idea the monster that was growing in the dark, silently, inside our perfect, healthy little girl. We had no idea how quickly a normal life can be stolen.

It happened on July 14th. The day our world ended.

It started as a normal evening. We were getting ready for bed, the kids were bathed, and the house was settling into that familiar, comfortable quiet. Then Blanka complained of a headache. It wasn’t a normal, sleepy complaint. It was a sound. A sharp, piercing cry that ripped through the house and stopped my heart. Before we could even process it, she was violently sick.

We rushed to her. She was scared. We were scared. “Mommy, I…”

And then she was gone.

Her eyes rolled back. Her little body went limp. She collapsed. It wasn’t sleep. It was a terrifying, absolute stillness. She was unconscious. The silence that followed that one, sharp cry was the loudest, most terrifying sound I have ever heard.

The panic is a blur. The 911 call. The ambulance. The frantic, one-sided conversation with our child, begging her to wake up. “Blanka, baby, open your eyes. Mommy’s right here. Wake up. Please, please wake up.”

We arrived at the hospital in a state of primal terror. Doctors and nurses swarmed. We were pushed into a waiting room, a sterile, beige box where other people’s lives were also falling apart. The hours bled together. We just stared at a spot on the wall, repeating the same words over and over. “She just had a headache. She just had a headache.”

Finally, a doctor came in. His face was a mask, but his eyes were heavy. He didn’t need to say much. The words he used were clinical, cold, and utterly devastating.

“Your daughter has had a significant brain hemorrhage. A bleed.”

The world tilted. A bleed? How? She didn’t fall. She wasn’t in an accident. How?

“We have to take her into surgery immediately,” he said, his voice firm. “This is a life-saving operation. We have to relieve the pressure.”

Life-saving. Those two words confirmed what we already knew in our hearts: she was dying. Right now, on a table, under lights, our baby was dying.

We felt a shock so profound it was physical. It was like being submerged in ice water. We signed the papers, our hands shaking so violently we could barely hold the pen. We watched them wheel her gurney through the double doors, and then they were gone. We were left alone, in the hallway, under the hum of fluorescent lights, with nothing but the image of her pale, still face burned into our minds.

We were parents. Magda and Szymon. And we had just handed our child over, with no idea if we would ever see her alive again.

The surgery was a success, in the way that a skydiver whose parachute mostly opens is a success. They had saved her life. They had stopped the bleeding. But that was only the beginning of the nightmare.

The bleeding, they explained, wasn’t from a fall. It was caused by something else. Something that had been growing, wrapping itself around the delicate blood vessels in her brain until one of them finally burst.

They had found a tumor.

The word just hung in the air. Tumor. It’s a word you hear in movies. It’s a word that happens to other people. It’s not a word that belongs in the same sentence as “your four-year-old child.”

But the nightmare was just setting in. Blanka didn’t wake up.

Not after the surgery. Not the next day. Not the day after that.

She was moved to the Intensive Care Unit. She was in a coma.

For thirty-two days, our daughter slept.

You cannot know what time is until you have lived it in an ICU. Time ceases to be morning, noon, and night. It becomes a series of beeps from a monitor. It becomes the shift change of the nurses. It becomes the hope that rises with the sun, that “today will be the day,” and the crushing, suffocating disappointment that settles in when the sun goes down and her eyes are still closed.

We lived in that room. One of us would be there, holding her small, limp hand, and the other would be at home, trying to hold our other daughter, Liliana, whose world had also been shattered. How do you explain to a 9-year-old that her sister went to sleep and just… didn’t wake up? How do you comfort her when you are crumbling yourself?

We talked to Blanka. We sang to her. We read her favorite “Kicia Kocia” books, our voices cracking as we read about a happy cat to our still, silent child. We prayed. We begged. We pleaded with her. “Blanka, please come back. Liliana misses you. Mommy and Daddy are right here. Please, just open your eyes.”

Every morning, we walked into that room terrified of what the day would bring. Every evening, we left with the same hope: that tomorrow, she would wake up.

And during that long, terrible vigil, the other hammer fell. The biopsy results came back.

A doctor sat us down in a small, windowless room. “We have the pathology,” he said. And then he gave the monster a name.

Anaplastic ependymoma.

Not just a tumor. A malignant, aggressive, cancerous brain tumor. The words hit us like a physical blow. Malignant. Złośliwy. A word that means “with evil intent.”

It was a nightmare within a nightmare. Our daughter was in a coma, fighting for her life from a brain hemorrhage, and now we knew that if she woke up, she would wake up to a war. She would wake up to cancer.

On the 32nd day, she woke up.

It wasn’t like in the movies. There was no dramatic gasp, no sitting upright. It was a flicker. A flutter of her eyelashes. A groan.

The relief that washed over us was so total, so all-consuming, that we both collapsed. She was back. Our baby was back.

But she wasn’t. Not really.

The Blanka who woke up was not the Blanka who had collapsed on the floor. The bleed, the tumor, the surgery, the long sleep… it had all taken a terrible toll. She was awake, but she wasn’t connecting. She stared blankly. She couldn’t speak.

And she couldn’t move.

The damage was done. Our little girl, who had been running and laughing just weeks before, could no longer walk. She couldn’t even sit up on her own. The monster in her brain had stolen her spark, and now it had stolen her body, too.

But she was a fighter. Day by day, slowly, painfully, she started to come back to us. A flicker of recognition. A weak squeeze of our hand. The first time she whispered “Mommy,” we both wept with a joy so fierce it hurt.

The battle had begun. Because the surgeons, in that first life-saving operation, had not been able to get the whole monster. It was too dangerous. It was wrapped too tightly around critical parts of her brain.

A “remnant” was left behind.

The moment she was stable, the war started. Chemotherapy.

We were moved to the oncology ward. This is a place no parent should ever have to know. A place full of smiling children with no hair, hooked up to poison drips. And now, our daughter was one of them.

Blanka has endured three cycles of chemotherapy. She will likely get a fourth at the beginning of November. We have watched her beautiful hair fall out. We have held her as she’s been sick. We have held her down, screaming, as nurses searched for a vein. It is a constant, unending trauma.

And then, the meeting. The one where they tell you the results. We sat in another small room, our hands clasped so tightly our knuckles were white.

The oncologist looked down at his papers. “The chemotherapy… it isn’t working as we’d hoped.”

The air left the room.

“It’s slowing the tumor’s progress,” he continued, “but it’s not killing it. The remnant is still there. It’s active. We have to change course.”

“What’s next?” I whispered. The words barely came out.

“Radiation,” he said. “It’s the next step. But… we need to be very clear about the implications.”

We knew what that meant. We had spent our sleepless nights on Google, in medical journals, in dark forums for parents of sick children. Radiation. For a 4-year-old’s developing brain.

He described it as a “necessary evil.” He used phrases like “significant risk,” “cognitive side-effects,” “hormonal damage,” and “lifelong consequences.”

He was telling us that to save her from the monster, we had to unleash a different kind of monster. One that would burn her, scar her, and potentially steal the very essence of the child we were trying to save.

“So we either let the tumor take her,” my husband Szymon said, his voice flat, “or we poison her future?”

The doctor looked at us with a profound sadness. “That is the choice.”

We sat in a silence so thick it was hard to breathe. We were at the end of the road. Two horrible, impossible paths, and we had to choose one.

“There is,” a new voice said, “one other possibility. It’s not one we can offer here.”

We turned. A younger doctor, a consultant, had been standing in the doorway. He stepped in. “It’s called proton therapy. ‘Protonoterapia.'”

We had never heard of it.

He explained. Traditional radiation, he said, is like a floodlight. It goes in, hits the tumor, but it also burns everything in its path, front and back. It’s crude.

“Proton therapy,” he said, “is a laser. It’s a beam of energy that we can aim with millimeter-precision. It enters the body, delivers its full, killing dose only to the tumor, and then it stops. It doesn’t exit the other side. It doesn’t touch the healthy tissue around it.”

He looked at us. “For a child her age, with a tumor in this location… it is the only option that saves her and her future.”

Hope. It was a feeling so unfamiliar we had almost forgotten it. It was a jolt of electricity. A path. A miracle.

“How do we do it?” we asked, both of us leaning forward, alive for the first time in months. “Where do we sign up?”

And that’s when the walls, the real ones, went up.

We live in Poland. We applied to our national health fund, the NFZ. It was a formality, we assumed. How could anyone deny a 4-year-old child the most advanced, life-saving treatment in the world? We filled out the forms. We filed the appeals. We waited.

The denial came in an email. A single, cold, bureaucratic sentence.

“NFZ does not refund this treatment for this specific type of tumor.”

We read it once. Twice. Ten times. It didn’t make sense. A typo? A mistake?

We made calls. We were frantic. The answer was the same, repeated in monotone voices over the phone. It wasn’t a mistake. It was policy. A rule. A line in a regulation book. Her specific cancer, anaplastic ependymoma, was on the wrong list.

A rule.

Our daughter’s life was being threatened by a tumor, and blocked by a line of text.

We had lost our savings. The months of travel, the medications, the private rehabilitation Blanka needs just to learn to sit up again… it had drained us. We had nothing left. We had put our faith in a system, and the system had just told us “no.”

But we had a name. The doctor had given us a name. A clinic in Essen, Germany. A place that specializes in this exact treatment. A place that saves children like Blanka every single day.

We contacted them. We sent her files, her scans, her entire life story in a stack of medical records.

Their reply came in 24 hours. “We can help her. We believe we can be successful.”

We wept. We held each other and wept. The path was real.

But it came with a warning. A deadline.

“The chemotherapy is a temporary dam,” they said. “It’s holding the pressure, but the scans show it won’t hold for long. She must begin proton therapy no later than the middle of November. After that, the window will close.”

We looked at the calendar. We have weeks.

So now, we are in a new kind of race. It’s not just a race against a tumor. It’s a race against a calendar.

We are no longer just Magda and Szymon, parents. We are fighters. We are trying to move a mountain that stands between our daughter and the one clinic on earth that can save her.

We look at Blanka. She is weak. She can’t walk. But she is fighting. She spends hours in grueling physical therapy. She cries, but she doesn’t stop. She still has that spark of curiosity, that same will. She is doing her part. She woke up after 32 days.

Now, we have to do ours.

We have until November.