Beau Brewer is an eight-year-old boy who loves playing third base on his baseball team and being silly with his four siblings. The main difference between him and the other kids in his elementary school class? A few weeks ago, he was diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor—a grade 3 ependymoma. It all began when he started complaining about a headache and even asked to be checked out of school because he was in so much pain. His mom, Leslie, is a local nurse practitioner with a strong pediatric background, so she watched him carefully for any sign that something was off. “I was watching him, and he was still eating, sleeping, and playing,” she remembers.
On day ten, she took him to a pediatrician for a second opinion, and everything turned out great—the pediatrician wasn’t concerned. But at the end of the second week and the beginning of the third week of headaches, Beau started vomiting at school and had to be checked out twice. That’s when Leslie and her husband, Matt, knew something was off. Knowing she wouldn’t be able to sleep, Leslie took Beau by herself to the ER at Children’s to get a CT scan; that’s when they found a 4-centimeter by 4-centimeter tumor in the back of his brain. “The whole world of unknowns opened up. ‘We know your son has a tumor: We don’t know anything else,’” she recalls, thinking back to when the doctors pulled her into a separate room to tell her.
Within six hours of arriving at the ER, the doctors performed an emergency procedure to put a drain in Beau’s brain to take the pressure off his brain. Soon thereafter, Beau had to undergo a nine-hour brain surgery to remove the tumor. “That was the longest day of our lives,” Leslie shares. “It was a mother’s greatest fear unfolding right before our eyes.” It was hard to believe—after all, he’d played a baseball game the night before they went to the hospital and hit a triple.
The tumor came back as a pretty rare form of aggressive pediatric cancer, called ependymoma, but they had to wait to discover what subtype he had (each subtype varies in aggression). Although the surgery itself was successful, Beau awoke dealing with unexpected complications. Whereas most children can walk out of the hospital after a surgery like his, Beau experienced posterior fauces syndrome, which required him to relearn how to talk, walk, use his hands, etc. “We watched them wheel away what felt like a healthy boy, and then they brought him back and he was operating like an infant,” Leslie explains. They were admitted to the hospital for a month.
While no cancer diagnosis is “good” news, it was encouraging when pathology finally came back with the tumor’s results as PFB, which is the least aggressive type of ependymoma. Eighty-five percent of children usually have PFA, which has a 30 percent survival rate. The overall survival rate of patients with PFB is 85 percent, so it’s a more hopeful outlook for Beau. “The grade 3 tumor grew very fast—he was fine until he was not. We caught it relatively early,” Leslie states.
After he recovered enough to be able to travel, Beau and his family headed to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital for six weeks of proton radiation therapy. “It was a no-brainer to our family that we were going to pack our family up because our family is a unit,” Leslie says. So off they went, with their 8-year-old, 6-year-old, 4-year-old, 2-year-old, and 9-month-old infant in tow. Leslie has been overwhelmed at the kindness of not just St. Jude’s staff, but also strangers living in Memphis, for the way they have taken care of Beau and their family as a whole. The Vestavia community has gone above and beyond in supporting the Brewers, but now “there are strangers in Memphis that are helping with meal trains and childcare,” Leslie describes.
Nowadays, Beau is making a miraculous recovery from posterior fauces syndrome. “He’s almost back to baseline,” Leslie tells me. “A month out of surgery, he’s able to hit a baseball with a bat.” Being with his siblings is what she credits to his sudden turn for the better. Beau went about a week without being able to speak or swallow, being fed through feeding tubes. The doctors warned that loud noises might disturb him, but their loud family was just what he needed. Leslie says, “It brought life back to Beau to be with his family again.” Now he’s starting to learn how to run again, and his story is making a difference. “He’s bringing people to tears and affecting people at the heart of the issue in a huge way, whether it’s people who have been working with kids like this or people in the community,” Leslie says confidently. “People I don’t even know are supporting him.”
How are they making it through this ordeal? A whole lot of love, help, and prayers from their community… and even so, some days are still rocky as they navigate the emotional, medical, and logistical challenges of caring for their whole crew. Nonetheless, as Leslie puts it, “Beau is helping families and our community come together and realize what matters, how fragile life is, and the resilience of a child, [as well as] drawing them near to God who has been so kind during this prognosis.”
If you want to support them, you can visit their registry. Follow along with Leslie on her pediatric health Instagram page @ask_the_np_mom, where she shares updates and asks for prayer on their journey. “It’s an intimate part of our life, but I want to share it with people who can support Beau and witness the kindness of God in suffering and how important faith is to suffering as a family,” Leslie explains. She has resolved to not stay silent on something that can affect people in a positive way.
Her takeaway advice? “I’m learning how to dwell in the light, and it’s something you have to practice doing. Dwelling on things that keep you unshakeable—it’s important for all parents, for everyone. If we’re not suffering, we will, because that’s the human experience. It’s in the waters of deep suffering that we learn deep things about God.”
May is Brain Cancer Awareness Month. Sometimes when I see the commercials roll for pediatric patients with cancer, it’s hard to grasp the reality behind their story, but Beau’s story hits close to home because the city he calls home, I call home, and likely, so do you. You never know when the unthinkable could happen. Does that mean you should live in fear every day? No—rather, take a minute today as you tuck your littles in or make Kraft mac and cheese for the third time this week or fold five loads of laundry to appreciate the gift of life and say a prayer for Beau and the Brewer family as they continue navigating this cancer journey.
