Hazel has COVID.
A small sentence, spoken quietly, yet carrying the kind of weight that can make an entire family stop moving, stop breathing, stop pretending that the ground beneath them is steady when they know it has been trembling for months.

Her mother didn’t expect it at all.
There was no fever, no cough, no warning sign that anything was wrong.
Just a quick test — something she did only because she was preparing to book flights for their upcoming trip to New York, a trip that carried with it all the fragile hope and desperation that comes with childhood cancer treatment.

Then the second line appeared.
Clear.
Sharp.
Unforgiving.
As if it were saying, Your plans must change. Your hope must shift. Your fear must find new places to settle.

For most children, a positive COVID test is nothing more than an inconvenience.

For Hazel — a little girl already fighting a vicious disease — it is a complication that can bend the entire trajectory of her treatment, widening gaps that should never widen, slowing a momentum that should never slow.

Because when Hazel tests positive for COVID, everything stops.
Her immunotherapy — the treatment her body needs most, the treatment designed to hold back the cancer that has tried again and again to take more from her — must be paused.

And the space where immunotherapy should have been becomes a dangerous silence.
A silence where cancer sometimes advances.
A silence her parents have been terrified of before.
A silence they never wanted to hear again.

Hazel can still receive chemotherapy, and her medical team has agreed that she should.
They are already a week behind schedule, already pushing against the timeline, already holding their breath as they wait for the next step in her care.

So the trip to New York will continue.
They will fly out this weekend, desperately hoping it will be a quick visit — in and out — with no complications and no slowed progress.

Her mother asks for prayer, not casually, not gently, but with the urgency of someone whose entire world is held together by threads that feel thinner every day.

“Please pray that the chemotherapy is enough to keep the disease at bay,” she writes, the words heavy with memory, because Hazel has progressed before on chemo alone — and they all remember what that looked like, what that felt like, how it nearly shattered them.

And then there is the part that terrifies her the most — the virus itself.
COVID, like flu and strep and other infections, has too often been followed by relapse in children like Hazel.

“Too often,” her mother writes, “and it can’t be coincidence.”
A simple sentence, but one that trembles with dread.

Yet somehow — beautifully, unbelievably — Hazel feels fine.
She is playing.

She is laughing.
She has only the slightest runny nose, and even that seems like nothing more than a mild annoyance.
A small mercy in a world that has rarely given her anything that resembles ease.

Her mother hopes that the antibodies from nursing may have helped protect her.
She hopes Hazel’s little body is stronger than anyone realizes.
She hopes the virus will pass quietly, harmlessly, without stirring the cancer that has already stolen too much from her childhood.

But behind that hope is fear — a fear she is trying not to let grow too loud.
She knows the gap between immunotherapy cycles will now be longer than planned.

Longer than comfortable.
Longer than safe.
A thought that makes her stomach twist, her breath shorten, her mind fill with possibilities she cannot bear to imagine.

“God is in control,” she tells herself, pressing the words into her heart like a prayer, like a shield, like a reminder she must cling to even when anxiety claws at the edges of her resolve.

And Hazel, in all her innocence, simply continues being Hazel.
Joyful.
Bright.
Unaware of how many people are fighting for her, praying for her, holding her name in their hands as if it were a small flame they must protect from the wind.

Her mother asks again:
“Please pray for our girl.”
Three simple words that feel like a plea, a whisper, a cry wrapped in courage.

Because Hazel has COVID.
Hazel has cancer.

Hazel has a family doing everything in their power to keep the ground from collapsing beneath her tiny feet.

They need prayers for the chemo to hold the disease still.
Prayers for the virus to remain mild.
Prayers for time — precious, irreplaceable time — to pass without letting the cancer gain ground.
Prayers for the gap between treatments not to become an opening for fear to slip in.
Prayers for the medical team, the travel ahead, the fragile hope that has carried them this far.

Hazel is still smiling.
Still playing.
Still glowing with the kind of inner light that children have, the kind that cancer has tried to dim but has never been able to extinguish.

And now, more than ever, her family needs the world to lift her up.
To speak her name with intention.
To whisper hope into the air on her behalf.
To surround her with the kind of prayer that holds steady even when everything else feels uncertain.

Hazel has COVID — but Hazel also has a world willing to fight for her.

And as her mother keeps reminding herself, again and again, sometimes with shaking hands and sometimes with steady faith —

God is still in control.
Hazel’s story is still being written.
And the next chapter needs every prayer that love can offer.