She slowly lost her vision. She slowly became a different person. My baby sister, 7 years old, was slowly fading away. And why did she have all these changes all of a sudden? She had brain cancer, and we didn’t even know.

Finally my dad took her to the doctor, and they gave us the news. They said 12 months, 24 if your lucky. Everyone told us not to push our luck, and at the same time they gave us sympathy. Eventually, she had to stop going to school and get a private tutor. Eventually, I lost my sister that I had once known. Eventually, she was gone, no longer was she Erica. She was someone else, a sicker Erica.

Every other week she would go to the hospital and get her chemo, it was horrible. She had a smell, a smell of death, it wasn’t just the same. She was always bitter, she never talked unless she was yelling, and one day she just quit. None of us knew why, none of us noticed until my youngest brother mentioned it. Erica wouldn’t say, she said it wasn’t any of our business, she said it was her problem, not ours. And then one day I found out that everyday after the home school teacher Erica would throw up so much that she passed out. She thought it was something wrong with her, and since the doctors had been so negative with her, she figured there was no point in getting treatment. The way she saw it, she wasn’t going live anyway. Why should she have to go through having another needle put into her? What’s the point in wasting her time when it wouldn’t work? Little did she know, it would help! All she needed was a stronger medicine. But that “little stronger” medicine, ended up being a lot stronger. She had to stay constantly at the hospital; she didn’t have the energy to do anything. She spent her whole summer in there.

But eventually my baby sister came back. Eventually she was Erica. Eventually she was better. She beat the odds of everyone, no one expected her recovery. Luckily that “little stronger” medicine, made my baby sister a little stronger person.