‘Cancer has taken so much … but it’s also given us a few things’: One family’s journey

A Seventeen-Year-Old’s Fight for Life, and the Research Gap Behind It

Healfromzero.com – Every dollar of federal research funding in the United States allocates roughly four cents toward pediatric cancer studies. That figure — small enough to fit inside a single coin’s worth of attention — represents the entire institutional commitment to a disease that strikes children and teenagers with a ferocity adults rarely face. Drug manufacturers, meanwhile, tend to look past the pediatric market altogether, leaving young patients to rely on clinical trials that are fewer, shorter, and harder to access than their adult counterparts.

For Sabina McMahon, that gap is not an abstraction. It is the reason her family has crossed state lines repeatedly, the reason a clinical trial enrollment in Cleveland lasted barely long enough to begin before aggressive lung tumors forced her back into chemotherapy, and the reason she now sits in a treatment room at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, while her parents and younger brother Charlie have uprooted their lives in Portland, Oregon, to stay beside her.

The Diagnosis That Rewrote a Childhood

Sabina was twelve when a doctor told her she had osteosarcoma, a malignant bone cancer. The standard response at that age — screaming, crying, bolting from the room — was available to her. She chose none of it.

“I sat up straight, swallowed and listened as my doctor pulled the rug out from under my perfect childhood. You don’t walk out on the plan to save your life.”

What followed was a sequence of interventions most children never imagine: rounds of chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and a major resection surgery that removed the tumor from her right knee and replaced the damaged bone with a titanium rod. For a stretch of more than a year after treatment concluded, tests came back clean. Then the cancer resurfaced in her lungs — the first of five relapses she has endured since.

What the Body Remembers, and What It Buries

Asked to recount her treatment, Sabina admits her memory is patchy. Fellow patients in what they call the “cancer club” label the phenomenon ChemoBrain. As she has grown older, however, she has come to understand it differently: medical post-traumatic stress disorder, or MPTSD, in which the brain actively suppresses recall of grueling experiences to spare the body a second exposure.

The fragments that do survive are vivid. She recalls strapping a beeping IV pole to the back of a trike and racing loops around the children’s oncology ward, hoping the exertion would sweat out some of the medicine. She remembers the particular expression on her parents’ faces and the sweet chime of a bell marking the end of a treatment cycle. She remembers the extremes — the soaring highs and the crushing lows — and says she would not exchange any of it, for reasons she cannot fully articulate.

A Mother’s Commute Through Grief

Sabina’s mother describes a different geography of pain: the one measured in miles between home and hospital. In 2021, the family lived six miles from Doernbecher Children’s Hospital in Portland. Each trip lasted long enough to play three or four songs on the car stereo, volume cranked high. Sean, her husband, would text her “let’s go” as he drove home from the chemo ward to be with Charlie while she drove in to be with Sabina. They were navigating what she calls their “horrific new normal” in its earliest days.

Nearly five years later, the moments of weakness hit harder. She describes them as grinding her to a halt, reducing her to “a puddle of tears and snot.” She has learned to contain that version of herself inside the car, letting it out alone because she manages it better that way. When fear and sadness crest, she drives with the music up. Her go-to tracks include “Forever Young” by Alphaville, “Before I Walk on Fire” by Sophie B. Hawkins, and “Bigger Than the Whole Sky.”

Still Singing, Still Studying, Still Advocating

At seventeen, Sabina is preparing for her senior year of high school. She has also completed her first full-length album as a singer-songwriter, a project she finished amid ongoing treatment. Beyond the music, she has stepped into public advocacy, speaking about the urgent need to increase federal investment in pediatric oncology research and to encourage pharmaceutical companies to develop therapies for younger patients.

Her story, shared alongside her family’s, was edited for length and clarity. What remains is a portrait of a family that has traveled across the country chasing the best available care, that has lost and regained normalcy repeatedly, and that continues — stubbornly, loudly, with the car stereo turned up — to insist that a teenager’s life deserves the same research attention as an adult’s.

The four-cents-per-dollar figure is not a statistic to file away. It is the distance between a child’s survival and a system’s indifference, measured in units smaller than a single coin. Sabina’s five relapses, her titanium knee, her lung tumors, and her family’s endless cross-country drives are what that number looks like when it lands on a real person.