Ten-week-old Madison had a “glow” in her eye, remembers her mom, Stephanie Janes. Not quite the glow of a bright-eyed baby. Something different.

“When you look at her baby photographs now, you can see it.” In the overexposed shots, “Madison’s right eye is red, but her left eye shows up as white.”

First-time parents Stephanie and her husband, Todd, were concerned enough to take their tiny daughter to the doctor — even though it was the day of her christening. Within hours, they found themselves on the next flight out of their home in Happy ValleyGoose Bay to St. John’s, Newfoundland, where they consulted with specialists at the Janeway Children’s Health and Rehabilitation Centre. There, they got the worst news they could imagine: Madison had a rare, life-threatening form of retinoblastoma, a cancer of the eye.

“It was devastating,” says Stephanie, who was 24 at the time. “All I heard was the word ‘cancer,’ and that just stuck with me.”

Again, the young family needed to travel: this time to the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. There, Madison had surgery to remove her left eye — she now has a prosthetic one. Stephanie and Todd learned some good news: they had caught the cancer early, and it hadn’t spread.

Still, Madison would need to be monitored closely. And so began a ritual of travelling to Toronto for monthly checkups at SickKids. The trip was long, and expensive — folks in Stephanie’s hometown of Stephenville, Newfoundland, held fundraisers to help, and the Janeses stayed at the Ronald McDonald House in Toronto. But the constant monitoring proved crucial: when Madison was two, her doctors detected a tumour in her right eye.

“My biggest fear was that she would be blind,” says Stephanie. “But they caught the tumour so early that they could save the eye. And the cancer hasn’t returned since.”

Madison — now a healthy, go-getter, eight-year-old — still travels to Toronto for regular checkups. On her last trip, Stephanie, Todd, and little sister Morgan, came along and the family made a small vacation out of the journey.

Over the course of the two years between Madison’s first and second diagnoses, Stephanie and Todd had a crash course not only in parenting, but in becoming parents of a child with cancer. They went from being overwhelmed, confused, and scared to strong and matter of fact.

“I thought it would be the end of us,” says Stephanie. “But when you go through something like that, it makes you stronger. I would do whatever it took to get Madison wherever she needed to be.”