TAL-OROQQ, Malta (Reuters) – Strangely, I can’t clearly picture the face of the surgeon who changed my family’s life. I’m not sure I’d recognize him if I bumped into him in the street. And yet I can vividly recall his face turning pale the instant he looked at the X-rays of my 14-year-old daughter’s shoulder.

Her chronic pain had first been diagnosed as a likely inflammation, and then possibly some problem in the muscle that could be fixed with a few physiotherapy sessions. But on that day, October 31, 2019, we found out that it was Ewing’s Sarcoma, a rare and extremely aggressive form of bone cancer. The cancer had started deep in the sponge bone of her humerus and then broke out through the bone surface, causing excruciating pain, then metastasizing to several other parts of her body.

Rebecca, or Becs, as we call her, was suddenly fighting for