LAX REGULATION? –
Jan. 25, 2023 – At an urgent care clinic, the doctor found more lumps under Isadora’s arms and in her groin. The doctor urged Emily to take her daughter to a hospital as soon as she and her husband returned home from visiting family.
Back home in Porto Alegre in southern Brazil, Emily watched as doctors hurried her daughter through medical tests. The lumps had grown. That night in 2017, Isadora was lying on a stretcher beside Emily when a doctor told her the news. Isadora had an aggressive form of leukemia, a cancer that affects white blood cells and that is the most common kind of childhood cancer. Her treatment would be grueling: a cocktail of chemotherapy drugs that would leave her skeletal, vomiting, and lethargic. One cancer doctor described this process as a fine art: to almost kill a child, but not quite. Isadora, usually a bubbly baby, began to suffer side effects. Emily took hope from the idea that, although the drugs were making her daughter sick, they were also curing her.
