Chapter 1 - THE PAIN HE REFUSED TO BELIEVE
For weeks, my fifteen-year-old daughter, Maya, told us that the pain in her stomach would not go away.
She was exhausted, losing weight, and barely eating.
My husband, Robert, refused to take her seriously.
“She only wants attention,” he said. “We are not wasting money on a hospital because of a stomachache.”
But I watched Maya grow weaker every day.
She stopped playing soccer.
She slept for hours after school.
Some nights, I found her gripping the bathroom sink because she was too dizzy to stand on her own.
Then, at 2:13 one morning, I heard her crying.
She was curled up on her bed with both hands pressed against her abdomen.
“Mom,” she whispered. “Please help me.”
The next morning, I picked her up from school without telling Robert and drove straight to Riverside Medical Center.
During the ultrasound, the technician stopped speaking.
He took several pictures, left the room, and returned with Dr. Lawson.
The doctor studied the screen before turning toward us.
“We found a mass in Maya’s abdomen,” he said carefully. “We do not yet know what it is, but she needs more testing immediately.”
Maya squeezed my hand.
Then the doctor asked a question that made my heart stop.
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“Why wasn’t she brought back after her first scan?”
Continue to Part 2 to discover who took Maya for that first scan—and why Robert was more afraid of the old medical record than the mass growing inside his daughter.
