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

A Family’s Five-Year Battle With a Bone Cancer That Keeps Coming Back

Goldlaner.com – For the McMahon family of Portland, Oregon, the word “normal” has taken on a very different meaning over the past half-decade. What began as a routine childhood for their daughter Sabina, then just 12 years old, shattered the day a doctor delivered a diagnosis of osteosarcoma — an aggressive form of bone cancer. Since that moment, the family has endured five separate relapses, multiple rounds of chemotherapy, radiation therapy, major surgery, and a cross-country scramble to find the best possible care for a teenager whose lungs became the next battleground after the cancer escaped its original site in her leg.

Today, at 17, Sabina is being treated at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, where her parents and younger brother Charlie have relocated to stay close to her. The family’s latest chapter began late last spring, when Sabina enrolled in a clinical trial in Cleveland only to be pulled out almost immediately so she could receive chemotherapy aimed at shrinking aggressive tumors that had taken hold in her lungs.

The Diagnosis No One Expects at Twelve

Sabina herself recalls the moment with a clarity that belies her age at the time. She describes sitting perfectly still in the examination room, swallowing hard, and listening as her physician dismantled the assumptions of a carefree childhood. There was no screaming, no running from the room. There was only the grim arithmetic of survival: the poison they would pump into her veins, the heavy-metal prosthetic knee that would eventually replace the bone they had to cut away, and the sudden, terrifying awareness that the world was no longer a safe place for her.

“You do all of this … because there is no other choice.”

That single sentence encapsulates what every pediatric cancer family learns within the first few hours of a diagnosis: the plan to save your child’s life does not pause for their fear, and the child does not walk out on it.

What Remains After the Fog Lifts

Like many survivors of prolonged oncology treatment, Sabina has very little episodic memory of her chemotherapy cycles. Fellow patients in what they call the “cancer club” label the phenomenon ChemoBrain. As she has grown older, however, she has come to understand that the gaps may reflect medical post-traumatic stress disorder — MPTSD — in which the brain actively walls off the most grueling sensory details to spare the body a second reliving of them.

What she does remember are the landmarks: the resection surgery that removed the tumor from her right knee and installed a titanium rod in its place; the absurd, desperate joy of strapping her beeping IV pole to the back of a trike and racing circles around the children’s cancer ward in a futile attempt to sweat out the medicine; the particular expression on her parents’ faces and the sweet chime of the bell that rang when treatment finally ended. She remembers the peaks and the valleys, and she says, for reasons she cannot fully articulate, that she would not trade any of it away.

A Father’s Private Commute

Sean McMahon, Sabina’s father, describes a ritual that has become his sole outlet for the fear and grief that accumulate over years of caregiving. In autumn 2021, when the family still lived just six miles from Doernbecher Children’s Hospital in Portland, he would drive home from the chemo ward to be with Charlie while his wife drove in to sit with Sabina. Fifteen minutes of dark, leaf-strewn road, three or four songs cranked to maximum volume on the car stereo. That was the early period of what he calls their “horrific new normal.”

Nearly five years later, the same impulse still seizes him, but the episodes now devastate him more thoroughly. He describes grinding to a halt, dissolving into tears and snot, and choosing to let it happen only when he is alone behind the wheel. His go-to tracks for those moments include “Forever Young” by Alphaville, “Before I Walk on Fire” by Sophie B. Hawkins, and “Bigger Than the Whole Sky.”

Still Singing, Still Advocating

Despite the relentless medical schedule, Sabina has not abandoned the life she was building before the diagnosis. She is preparing to enter her senior year of high school and has completed her first full-length album as a singer-songwriter. More publicly, she has become a vocal advocate for pediatric cancer research — a field that currently receives roughly four cents of every dollar allocated to federal biomedical research and is frequently deprioritized by pharmaceutical companies chasing larger adult-market returns.

The gap between the urgency families feel at the bedside and the fraction of funding directed toward childhood cancers is precisely the disparity Sabina now works to close. Her story, shared here with her family’s collaboration through the Global Health Reporting Center and with support from the Pulitzer Center, is one of many that underscores how a single diagnosis can reorganize an entire household’s geography, finances, and sense of time — while the child at the center of it all continues, stubbornly, to write songs and plan for a future the disease has not yet been allowed to claim.