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‘Fenway magic:’ Methuen native flies 6-year-old daughter from California to Boston for brain cancer surgery
"We're coming home to finish this thing off once and for all," Layla's father Shawn Mahoney said.
Methuen native Shawn Mahoney, 42, remembers being cared for at Boston Children’s Hospital many times as a child.
Now, he’s flying his 6-year-old daughter, Layla Mahoney, all the way from Carlsbad, California, to Boston Children’s Hospital to make sure she’s in the best hands for her last shot at having a tumor surgically removed from her brain.
It all started for the Mahoney family in June 2021. Layla was having headaches every couple of days, which would sometimes cause her to vomit, her father said. The headaches got better for a little while, but in mid-July, Layla started vomiting again.
Layla’s mother, Mariel Mahoney, took Layla to the pediatrician while her husband was away for work. According to Layla’s father, Mariel tried to demand a CT scan, but the pediatrician said Layla would have to get a referral from neurology to have one.
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Instead, the pediatrician ordered many lab tests done. The labs didn’t show much except for a lack of iron in Layla’s blood, her father said, so the family made sure she ate more iron, and for about 10 days everything was fine.
But at the end of July, Layla started vomiting again, which continued the next two days. Her father said he took her to urgent care, but they didn’t have a CT scan.
Instead, they sent her home with some anti-nausea medication, which helped the vomiting, and the family made sure she got more electrolytes and left her to rest.
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But early the next morning, Layla was still vomiting, so her father said he rushed to get her to a children’s emergency room.
Mahoney said that the attending doctor told him Layla seemed ok, so he just wanted to get her on some morphine for the pain.
“By this time, her headaches were so severe that she was really complaining about it. She said ‘It feels like a horse is stepping on my head,'” Mahoney said.
So Mahoney said he told the doctor that he and Layla wouldn’t leave until they examined her head. The doctor thought it wasn’t necessary, Mahoney said, but Mahoney remained firm.
The attending doctor left, and that’s when things started to escalate quickly.
“She digressed to the point where she was screaming. She’s like ‘Daddy, help me, help me, save me, save me, do something, do something!'” Mahoney said.
“The head of the ER walked in on that. I turned around and saw her and she just had this look in her eyes which was like, ‘I need to talk to you right now.'”
Mahoney said the head of the ER told him she thought something was seriously wrong with Layla and would make sure she got a CT scan as soon as possible.
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Mahoney would later learn that Layla was showing all the signs of a rare cancer called ependymoma: nausea, vomiting, headaches, and an unsteady gait.
Mahoney helped Layla get the CT scan, but by this time, he said, she was like a potato sack in his arms, and he knew something was seriously wrong.
They went back to Layla’s room in the ER, and soon, multiple doctors came in, so Mahoney braced himself for bad news.
They told him that Layla had a tumor in her brain, and that it looked worse on the CT scan than it actually was.
“It looked like a bomb went off in her head,'” Mahoney said.
Mahoney said he comes from a medically savvy family, so he knew to take Layla’s vitals over time and could tell the doctors what was normal for her.
Mahoney wrote the data out for the doctors, and that’s when he said one of them realized that Layla’s heart rate was far below normal.
The doctors suddenly realized that Layla couldn’t wait a few days for surgery, Mahoney said. Her life was imminently at risk, and she needed to have surgery as soon as possible.
“She would not have made it another 24 hours,” Mahoney said.
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Layla went in for a six-hour surgery a few hours later, but not before her father kissed her goodbye, not knowing if she would come out of the surgery alive.
When Layla got out of surgery, Mahoney said the doctors told the family that the surgery had gone very well and that they believed they removed the entire tumor.
This was especially important because Layla had an anaplastic supratentorial ependymoma tumor, a type that is known to grow and regrow quickly.
An MRI seemed to confirm what the surgeon had said, Mahoney said, and so Layla went home after some recovery.
But just a few weeks later, as Layla was preparing for radiation therapy, the doctors discovered that the tumor was back.
So Layla went in for her second surgery, and again, Mahoney said the doctors said it went well. But this time, they left some of the tumor in, intending to target it with radiation therapy.
In the next few weeks, Layla became one of the youngest children to ever go through radiation therapy awake, Mahoney said. Then, in early December, she started chemotherapy, which he said was rough on her.
The chemo weakened Layla’s immune system so badly she started getting fevers and infections so severe that she had to go to the hospital, her father said. She also began to experience minor hearing loss.
After three rounds of chemo, Layla’s father found out from parents whose children also had this type of cancer that going back for another surgery to try to get the entire tumor was an option.
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So Mahoney began looking up the best surgeons in the country for this type of surgery. Eventually, he settled on Dr. Lissa Baird at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Mahoney said he chose Baird not just because she seemed to be on the same page with him about how to approach the surgery, but because she has an MRI machine in the operating room.
Mahoney said this means that before Baird finishes the surgery, she can ensure she got the entire tumor out, and if she finds she didn’t, she can go back in Layla’s head right then and there and get whatever is left.
If Baird does not manage to get the entire tumor out for one reason or another, Mahoney said that Layla can still go back to do more radiation treatment to get rid of what’s left.
Mahoney said he thinks it’s worth it to come back to Boston to try to finally bring an end to Layla’s cancer journey.
“Let’s get some Fenway magic, some home field advantage,” he said. “That’s why we’re coming home, to finish this thing off once and for all.”
Though this journey has been hard on Layla, who her father said doesn’t entirely understand what is going on and just wants to go back to school and see her friends, some fun things have happened to Layla because of it.
One of her father’s friends, who he knows through his work filming underwater animals, named a great white shark for her. Another adopted an elephant in Zimbabwe and named it after her.
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“Now she’s like, ‘Daddy can we go visit my elephant?'” Mahoney said.
Layla has also been featured on local news stations in San Diego, and soon got used to the spotlight.
“A couple of them ran a couple nights in a row, and then on the third day, she comes home from school and she’s like, ‘Daddy, what time am I on TV tonight?'” Mahoney said, laughing. “And I’m like, ‘Okay. We need to stop this. We need to keep you grounded.'”
Layla surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital is scheduled for March 11.
If you’d like to help Layla’s family while she battles cancer, you can donate to their GoFundMe.
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