Pamela Paul in The New York Times:
One night in 1981, in the middle of bath time, Marty Gonzalez noticed a strange glow that seemed to emanate from inside one of the eyes of her 9-month-old daughter, Marissa. “It was really bizarre,” Gonzalez recalls. “It looked like a cat’s eye — like I could see all the way through.” Though Marissa’s pediatrician in Long Beach, Calif., assured Gonzalez it was nothing, she sought another opinion. While teaching her sixth-grade class, Gonzalez anxiously awaited news from her mother, who had taken Marissa to see a pediatric ophthalmologist. By lunchtime, with still no word from her mom, Gonzalez called the doctor directly. “I think it’s cancer,” the doctor told her.
Marissa, it turned out, had retinoblastoma, or Rb, a rare but aggressive cancer that almost exclusively affects children. Rb makes up only 3 percent of all pediatric cancer cases, which translates into about 300 children in the United States a year. Marissa had tumors in both eyes and needed immediate treatment: cryotherapy to freeze the malignancies and radiation to destroy them. Two days later, Marissa and her mother were on a flight across the country to see a specialist in retinoblastoma at Columbia University.
More here.