A different kind of hope

I am sitting in a brightly lit, modern conference room on the 11th floor of the Seattle Children’s Research Institute, surrounded by strangers, desperately wiping the tears streaming down my cheeks and choking back the sobs threatening to accompany them. It is not the first conference of this kind that I have attended nor is it the first time I have actively engaged with the disease that ended my five-year-old son’s life.

I like to think I swim in the deep end of Sam’s disease. I have listened to doctors present on the intricacies of Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Gliomas (DIPG), the…