Every doctor treating my 7-year-old daughter for canc3r dressed up as superheroes for her birthday — she was already crying with joy when her oncologist knelt down and said, "There's one part of today your mom doesn't know about either."
Every doctor treating my 7-year-old daughter for cancer dressed up as superheroes for her birthday — she was already crying with joy when her oncologist knelt down and said, "There's one part of today your mom doesn't know about either."
My daughter Ivy has been fighting cancer for nearly a year.
A tumour on her left kidney, found in the November when she was six, because she said her tummy felt "full of stones" and I nearly did not take her to the GP.
I nearly did not go. I want that said, because it is the first thing I did wrong and I have to carry it.
It was a Tuesday. She said her tummy felt full of stones, and she had said her tummy hurt about once a week since she started school, and I thought it was the school dinners.
And I was going to give her some Calpol and put her to bed.
And then, getting her into her pyjamas, I put my hand on her side, and felt something under my palm that should not have been there. About the size of an orange. Hard.
I rang the GP at eight the next morning. We were at St Oriel's by four that afternoon.
I think about the Calpol a great deal. I think about how close I came to putting her to bed.
Surgery in the December. Then chemo. Then radiotherapy. Then more chemo. Needles, sickness, days when she could not sit up in bed.
And through all of it, somehow, she was still the one making everybody else smile.
She has this enormous, gappy, ridiculous grin that takes over her whole face. And she tells jokes. Terrible ones. To the nurses, to the cleaners, to the man who comes round with the tea trolley. Even on the worst days.
Especially on the worst days.
I want to describe one morning, because it is the one I think about now.
It was the end of the February. Round three of chemo. She had been sick four times before seven o'clock.
And I was holding the bowl, and she was lying back against the pillow the colour of the pillowcase, and she opened her eyes and said:
"Mum. What do you call a dinosaur that's asleep?"
And I said I don't know, sweetheart.
**"A dino-*snore*."**
And I smiled at her and said that's a good one and put the bowl down and went to rinse it.
And I stood at the little sink in the corner with my back to her and my eyes shut, because I had just watched my daughter throw up four times, and she was telling me a joke about a dinosaur.
I thought, at the time, she was being brave for herself.
I did not know she was watching my back, at the sink, to see what my shoulders did.
And her other great love is superheroes.
She has a collection of little plastic figures, about three inches high, and since she got ill they have become part of the ritual. She lines them up on the windowsill by her bed. She clips one to her drip stand. And before every round of chemo she picks a chemo buddy to hold.
So when I realised her seventh birthday would be spent on Kestrel Ward at St Oriel's, something in me just gave up.
I thought I would bring a cake. Put some bunting up. Make the best of a room with a bin marked clinical waste.
And that morning, at about ten, her consultant, Dr Adeyinka, put his head round the door and said he had to pop out for a few minutes.
And when the door opened again, Superman walked in.
Ivy just stared.
And then Wonder Woman came in behind him. Then Batman. Spider-Man. Captain America. A slightly lopsided Black Widow. A very tall Thor with a plastic hammer.
One after another — the consultant, the ward sister, the registrar, the phlebotomist, the play specialist, the healthcare assistant, the man from the tea trolley — every single person who had been looking after my daughter for a year walked into that room dressed as her heroes.
And Ivy lost it.
**She was laughing and crying at the same time so hard she could barely breathe. She kept pointing — at Precious, the ward sister, in the Wonder Woman tiara; at Raj from phlebotomy, whose Spider-Man mask had the eyeholes in slightly the wrong place — and shrieking, "*No way! No WAY!*"**
I was stood by the bed with my hand over my mouth, crying right along with her.
Then Dr Adeyinka — still in the cape, the red boots, all of it — came over and knelt down by the bed.
"There's one part of today your mum doesn't know about either."
Ivy looked straight at me. I had no idea what he meant.
He looked round at the others in their costumes. Then back at Ivy.
And his whole face changed.
What he said.
"Your end-of-treatment scans came back last night, Ivy."
And the room went quiet. Even Thor.
"I looked at them three times. And then I asked Dr Hale to look at them." Batman nodded. "And then we both went and got the radiologist out of bed, which she did not enjoy."
And then he said the words.
"There's nothing there. No sign of it anywhere. You're done, Ivy. No more chemo buddies."
I do not remember the next minute. I have tried. I remember my knees going and the side of the bed catching me. I remember Precious in her tiara holding my elbow.
And I remember Ivy.
Not laughing. Not cheering. She sat very still in the bed with her mouth open.
And then she turned — not to the doctor, not to the room full of heroes — to me.
And she said: "Mum. Are you going to laugh?"
And I did. I laughed until I could not stand up.
And she watched me doing it. With a very particular look on her face. A look I did not understand for another two months.
Home.
We went home on the twenty-ninth of October.
Eleven months. Our flat above the dry cleaner's felt like somebody else's. There was post on the mat from the previous February.
Ivy walked in and went straight to her bedroom and lay face down on her own bed for about ten minutes without saying anything.
And I sat on the kitchen floor with my back against the fridge and did the same.
I had not been in my own kitchen since the December. I had lived for eleven months on a fold-out chair on Kestrel Ward and a parents' room with a kettle and a microwave, and I had lost my job in the March because I could not do it from a hospital, and I had about four hundred pounds left of what I had saved.
I had told Ivy none of that.
I was very, very careful, for eleven months, to tell my daughter none of that.
And the thing I did not say, on that kitchen floor, which I will say now.
Ivy's father left when she was two. He sends a card at Christmas with a twenty-pound note in it and no return address.
I did not ring him when she was diagnosed. My sister did, in the December. He rang me once, in the January, and asked whether there was anything he could do, and I said no, and he said okay then, and that was the whole of his contribution to the worst year of his daughter's life.
So for eleven months it was me. My mother came on Saturdays when her hip let her. My sister came when she could get off.
And the rest of the time it was me, on a fold-out chair that did not fold out properly, next to a bed, doing the night obs in my head along with the nurses because I could not stop.
I did not have anybody to fall apart in front of.
Except, it turns out, the one person I was trying hardest not to.
The clinic.
Our first follow-up was on the fourth of December. Bloods, a quick scan, and a chat with Dr Adeyinka, back in his ordinary shirt.
Clear.
And afterwards, while Ivy was in the playroom with Kit the play specialist, Precious came and found me in the corridor.
Precious Moyo. Ward sister. Fifty-three. Twenty-eight years on children's oncology. The woman who had held my elbow in a Wonder Woman tiara.
And she said: "Beth. Have you got ten minutes? There's something you should know about the party."
I thought it was going to be the cost. I had been worried about the cost. Twelve costumes. I had been trying to work out how to pay them back.
It was not the cost.
And Precious herself, who told me that afternoon what she had not told anybody.
She said she nearly did not take it to the ward meeting.
Because in twenty-eight years she had been asked a lot of things by a lot of children. For their dog to be brought in. For a particular song. For a nurse to stay after her shift. For their mum and dad to stop arguing in the corridor.
And she had learned which ones you could do something about.
And a six-year-old asking you to make her mother laugh is not in any procedure.
"I nearly just said I'll try, darling, and left it," she told me. "That's what we say. I'll try."
"And then she said the bit about running out of jokes. And I went home that night and couldn't sleep."
"Because a child running out of jokes is something I have seen before. On that ward. And I have learned to be very frightened of it."
I did not ask her what she meant. I did not need to.
Whose idea it was.
In the August — two months before her birthday — Ivy had asked Precious if she could talk to her. On her own. When Mum was in the shower.
And Precious sat on the end of the bed, and Ivy said, very seriously, that she had a job for the nurses.
She said: "Can you make Mum laugh on my birthday?"
Precious asked her what she meant.
And my six-year-old daughter said: "She doesn't laugh any more. Only when I do a joke. And I'm running out of jokes."
Precious said she would see what she could do.
And then Ivy said the thing that Precious told me she has thought about every day since.
"Don't tell her I asked. She thinks I don't know she's sad."
The jokes.
Precious did not know about the notebook. Nobody did. I found it myself, the week after, in the bottom of Ivy's hospital bag, when I finally unpacked it.
A small pink notebook with a unicorn on the front that her grandmother sent in the January.
And in it, on every page, in her careful, wobbly, six-year-old handwriting — jokes.
Not jokes she had made up. Jokes she had collected.
From the tea trolley man. From the cleaners. From a book in the playroom. From a boy called Samir in the next bay who had since gone home. From the back of a lolly stick.
One on every line. Dated. Hundreds of them.
And at the top of every page, in the corner, a little box. And in each box, either a tick or a cross.
It took me about ten minutes to understand what the ticks meant.
Tick: Mum laughed.
Cross: Mum did not.
What the tally said.
I counted them. On the kitchen floor, with my back against the fridge again.
From the fourteenth of January to the twenty-first of October. Two hundred and eighty days with a joke written down.
Thirty-one ticks.
Two hundred and forty-nine crosses.
She had been telling me a joke every single morning for nine months. Every morning. On the mornings she was being sick. On the mornings after bad nights. On the morning of the surgery for her line.
And writing down, every night, after lights out, by the light of her tablet, whether it had worked.
And she was right. I had stopped laughing.
I had thought I was hiding it. I did the smiles. I said that's a good one, darling. I thought a smile and a that's a good one would pass.
It did not pass. She knew the difference between a smile and a laugh at six years old, and she wrote it down, two hundred and forty-nine times.
The big grin. The jokes with the nurses on her worst days. The girl everybody on Kestrel Ward said was the bravest little thing, always making everybody else smile.
It was not only bravery. It was a job.
My daughter had spent nine months of chemotherapy working. Trying to keep her mother going.
What I have had to take.
I have spent a great deal of this year being told I was strong.
By the nurses. By my sister. By women I barely knew at the school gate. You're so strong, Beth. I don't know how you do it.
And I did it by hiding everything from a six-year-old who could see all of it.
I hid the job. I hid the money. I hid the nights in the parents' room with the door shut and a towel against my mouth so nobody on the corridor would hear.
And I told myself that hiding it was protecting her.
It was not protecting her. It was giving her a second job. Because a child who can see her mother is sad, and is told nothing, does not stop seeing it. She just has to deal with it on her own.
So she dealt with it. With a pink notebook and a tea trolley man and a lolly stick.
And on the one day she was allowed to ask for anything she wanted, she asked the nurses to make me laugh.
The costumes.
Precious told me the rest, in that corridor, while Ivy built something out of foam blocks in the playroom behind the glass.
She had taken Ivy's request to the ward meeting in the September. And Dr Adeyinka had said: "Superheroes. Obviously."
The costumes came from everywhere. Precious's grandson. The fancy-dress shop on Coldharbour Lane, which lent six for free when they heard what for. Raj's Spider-Man was his own, from a stag do, which is why the eyeholes were wrong.
The tea trolley man, Dennis, is sixty-eight and had never worn a costume in his life, and he asked specifically to be Thor because the little one says he's the funny one.
And the scans.
The scans were not planned. That was the part nobody had arranged.
The results came in on the evening of the twenty-first. And Dr Adeyinka read them at half past nine at night and rang Precious at home and said: Tomorrow. We tell them tomorrow. In the costumes.
"He said you'd been waiting for that result for eleven months," Precious told me. "And he said Ivy had been waiting for something else for nine. And it seemed right that they arrived on the same morning."
He knew. They all knew. About the joke. About the notebook, even, some of them — Dennis had seen her writing in it.
Everybody on Kestrel Ward had known for two months that my daughter was trying to make me laugh.
Except me.
And Dr Adeyinka, who I went to see on my own in the January, because I needed to say something to him.
I wanted to thank him and I wanted to apologise, and they came out in the wrong order.
I said I was sorry I had not noticed. That the whole ward had known what my daughter was doing, and I was her mother, and I had not seen it.
And he leaned back in his chair and said something I have written on a card on my fridge.
"Mrs Kerr. In twenty years I have never met a parent on that ward who noticed. Not one. They can't. They're using everything they've got to stay upright."
"The children always see it. The parents never see the children seeing it. That's just what it is. It's not a failure. It's a ward."
And then he said: "That's why we listen to them when they ask for things. Because they're usually asking for you."
And then he told me that in twenty-one years on children's oncology, Ivy was the fourth child who had asked the nurses, secretly, to do something for a parent.
The fourth.
What I did.
I sat Ivy down that evening, at the kitchen table, with the pink notebook between us.
And her face when she saw it. As if I had found her diary. Frightened. Caught.
And I did the only thing I could think of, which was tell her the truth. All of it.
That I was sad. That I had been sad for a year. That I had lost my job and that we did not have much money and that some nights I had cried in the parents' room.
That none of it was her fault. And that none of it was her job.
And she listened to all of it very carefully, the way she listens to the doctors.
And then she said: "I know, Mum."
"I know you know. I'm telling you anyway. Because I shouldn't have made you carry it on your own."
And she looked at me for a long time. And then she picked up her pencil.
And she opened the notebook to the next clean page, and wrote the date. And drew the little box in the corner.
And did not put a joke on that page.
She just looked at me, and waited.
And I do not know why, but I started laughing. Not at anything. At her. At the box. At the pencil held ready.
And she put a tick in the box, and closed the book.
And the question she asked me in the room, in front of everybody, which I finally understood.
***Mum. Are you going to laugh?***
Not am I better. Not can we go home. Not really?
She had just been told, by a man in a cape, that the thing trying to kill her for a year was gone.
And her first question was about me. Because I was the other patient in that room. I had been for nine months. And she was checking my obs.
I did laugh. I laughed until my legs went. And she watched me do it the way Precious watches a monitor — very still, reading it.
And then she lay back against her pillow and closed her eyes and smiled.
And I thought she was tired.
She was not tired. She was off duty.
What changed at home.
I tell her things now. Not everything. She is seven.
But when I have a bad day at the library, I say so. When money is tight, I say we're a bit short this month so no takeaway, instead of pretending I fancy beans on toast. When I am sad about something, I say I'm sad today, it's not about you.
The first few times I did it, she went very still and watched my face — the old look, the checking look.
And then, around the March, she stopped doing it.
Now when I say I'm sad today, she says okay, and carries on with her Lego.
That okay is the best thing anybody has said to me in two years.
Where we are.
It has been a year. The one-year scan was in October. Clear.
I have a job again, three days a week, at the library, which lets me finish at three.
Ivy is back at school. She has hair again, curly, which neither of us was expecting. She still loves superheroes. She has retired the chemo buddies to a shelf above her bed, all eleven of them, in a row, and she says they are on holiday.
We go back to Kestrel Ward on the first Saturday of every month. Not for treatment. Ivy asked if she could.
She takes the pink notebook. She reads the jokes to the children on the ward. The ones with ticks.
And Dennis, the tea trolley man, who I owe a paragraph.
Sixty-eight. Forty years a bus driver, then retired, then bored, then a volunteer on Kestrel Ward three mornings a week pushing a trolley of tea and squash and biscuits.
He had a joke for every child, every morning. The same joke, often, for weeks. The children did not mind. They said it back to him.
And Ivy had, I found out from the notebook, collected forty-three jokes from Dennis. More than from anybody.
Because every morning, while I was in the shower, she would ask him for a new one. For Mum.
And Dennis — who could have given her the same one again — went home every evening and looked up a new one on his granddaughter's laptop. So he would have something fresh for her in the morning.
Forty-three evenings. He never told me. He never told anybody.
When I thanked him, in the December, he went bright red and said: "Well. She was very clear it had to be a new one. She said you'd heard all mine."
He was the one in the Thor costume. He has kept the hammer. He tells the new children on the ward that it's real.
And the last thing.
I did not look at the final page of that notebook until last week.
I had avoided it. I knew what date it would be.
The twenty-first of October, 2025. The night before her birthday. The night the scans came in, though none of us knew yet.
It is not a joke.
It is written in slightly bigger letters than the rest, pressed hard, the way she writes when something matters.
***Tomorrow is my birthday. I asked the nurses for Mum to laugh. If she laughs I don't need any more jokes.***
***If she doesn't, I have 11 left.***
I went back through the notebook after that. To find the eleven.
They are on the page before. Eleven jokes she had saved and not used. Numbered.
She had been rationing them.
The best ones, I think — she had put a little heart next to four of them. Held back for emergencies. For the days she thought I might really need it.
Number one is about a penguin. Number eleven is about a cow. Number seven is from Dennis and does not make any sense at all.
I read them to her now. One a night, at bedtime, since the January. We are on our third time round.
And she laughs at every single one. Even number seven. Especially number seven.
And she has never once asked for a tick.
And underneath, a small box in the corner. For the twenty-second.
She filled it in after we got home. I can tell, because it is in felt-tip and not pencil.
It is not a tick.
It is a star. Enormous. Going right over the edge of the box and onto the page and nearly off the bottom.
May you like
And next to it, in felt-tip, three words.
***Mum laughed. Done.***
