‘Aurora Strong’: 18-month-old Calgary girl fighting stage 4 neuroblastoma cancer

A Calgary family is facing long hospital stays, financial strain and emotional challenges, but they’re refusing to give up.

For Joseph and Jessica Daniels, the past seven months have meant sleepless nights, growing uncertainty, and a fight they never imagined their family would face — a fight for their daughter’s life.

On March 22, 2025, the parents of then 11-month-old Aurora brought her to the Alberta Children’s Hospital after noticing a troubling lump near her eye, bruising and recurring fever.

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Upon arrival, Aurora underwent immediate testing and received an MRI, but no one could have prepared the new parents for the news they were about to receive.

“Our precious baby girl had been diagnosed with high-risk stage 4 neuroblastoma cancer,” Joseph told CTV News. “It’s a diagnosis no parent should ever have to hear. It was heartbreaking.”

Arduous treatment plan

The cancer, which most commonly affects infants and young children, had spread to her abdomen and bones, including a mass near her kidney and another under her eye.

Now 18 months old, Aurora is in the midst of an arduous treatment plan involving chemotherapy, radiation, immunotherapy, a stem cell transplant and surgery.

Her father says Aurora’s bones haven’t quite taken to the chemotherapy, so another six months has been added to their treatment plan.

Despite the physical pain and long hospital stays, her father says Aurora’s spirit remains undimmed.

“She’s very, very spunky. She’s always happy, considering these circumstances and we can’t ever catch her down. She’s just a joy to be around,” he said.

“Waking up, she just wants to be happy and playful.”

But the toll on the family — financial, emotional, and physical — has been heavy.

‘Burned through our savings’

With Jessica’s maternity leave expired and her full-time caregiving duties preventing her from returning to work, the family has relied solely on Joseph’s income — until recently.

“I’ve had to stop working,” he said. “We burned through our savings pretty fast, and now the only mode of transportation we have is breaking down.”

Like many families navigating the financial strain of pediatric cancer treatment, the Daniels have turned to the community for help.

A GoFundMe page for Aurora set up by Joseph has raised $3,500 since it was launched earlier this summer, but he says more funds are needed to keep the family financially stable.

“Aurora has stage two kidney failure on her right side, and she’s losing a bit of her hearing now,” Joseph said.

“The next step is more immune therapy before the high dose chemotherapy and the stem cell transplants. She has quite a journey ahead of her, but we’re never going to give up.”

Understanding Neuroblastoma

Neuroblastoma is a complex and often aggressive form of childhood cancer.

“Most people think because of the word neuro, that it arises in the brain, but actually it’s not a brain tumor,” said Dr. Daniel Morgenstern, a staff oncologist at SickKids.

“It comes from peripheral nerves, so nerves that are outside of the brain, and it’s actually one of the most common solid tumors that children get. But it’s really not a cancer that affects adults, so most people have never heard of it.”

The causes of neuroblastoma also remain largely unknown.

“We really don’t know why neuroblastoma starts. We think that at some level, it must be to do with something that’s gone wrong during development,” Morgenstern said.

“There’s a lot of cells that need to divide to turn into organs, or that need to grow and spread around the body to create new parts of the body. And what we think is that somehow that process doesn’t get shut off, and so the cells that have grown to make an adrenal gland, for instance, just carry on growing, and that then causes a tumor, causes a cancer.”

Dr. Meredith Irwin, chief of paediatrics at SickKids, says neuroblastoma is most common in infants, with an average age of onset of 17 months.

“It’s a tumor that starts in the nerve cells that occur most commonly in the abdomen or chest or near the spine in children and infants,” she said. “About half of the time it can metastasize or spread most commonly to the bones.”

Irwin says that treatment varies depending on disease stage, patient age and tumor genetics.

Options for infants are improving, but the survival rate is only about 50 per cent for all children diagnosed with metastatic neuroblastoma.

“Many of us are really committed to trying to find better treatments, less toxic treatments as well, because a lot of these children, even when we cure them, are left with many long-term side effects from their treatment,” Irwin said.

“We’re all trying to work harder to trick the cancer without causing any damage to the children. People should have hope. We have come a long way.”

Morgenstern notes that some of the more promising research now involves the combination of immune therapy and chemotherapy

“We’re now using that combination routinely together, and the next stage of clinical trials are to then try and add something else on top of that to make the chemo immunotherapy work even better,” he said.

“The other big idea is about trying to look at the genes that are abnormal within the neuroblastoma tumors and to see if we can find particular genes that we could then target with drugs.”

Calls for faster access to treatment

Stage 4 neuroblastoma affects fewer than 100 children in Canada each year.

The aggressive cancer develops from immature nerve cells and is particularly challenging in infants.

“It’s very difficult to cure. It has a very high relapse rate,” said Antonia Palmer, co-founder of the Advocacy for Canadian Childhood Oncology Research Network (ACORN). “With neuroblastoma, pretty much every treatment is thrown at it.”

Palmer knows firsthand what families like the Daniels are facing; her son Nathaniel was diagnosed at age two with the same cancer and relapsed twice.

“He was diagnosed in 2009 at two years old with stage 4 high-risk neuroblastoma,” she said. “We had to learn a whole new language. We had to learn new norms and cultures and ways of navigating through the medical system.”

Nathaniel’s treatment lasted nearly seven years, including trips to the United States for clinical care not available in Canada. “The treatment is hard, the treatment is long,” Palmer said.

“It’s really reaching out to your community, reaching out to your family, to your friends, to other families who have been diagnosed, and finding ways of asking for help.”

She highlighted the broader impact on families.

“One parent, sometimes both, stop working to take care of their child. It’s very, very difficult for me. I was taking my other two children with me to clinic.”

Nathaniel, now 18, recently survived a rare secondary thyroid cancer caused by earlier treatments.

“My gratitude fills galaxies, because he is a remarkable young man,” Palmer said.

Her experience motivated her to cofound ACORN and advocate for systemic change.

“We have to work in really smarter ways. We have to work with international consortia to run clinical trials to push the science forward so that we can be making better decisions about treatment,” she said.

Palmer stressed the need for faster access to new therapies in Canada.

“Canada needs to do a much better job at approving drugs in a timelier way. We have lots of drugs which have just never been brought for approval here in Canada.”

As for parents of children with neuroblastoma like Joseph and Jessica, Palmer offers reassurance:

“It is a really tough diagnosis, but there is hope. There are better treatments, and things continue to get better. They just need to get better faster.”