In January 2025, 15-year-old Keira Rooney had a sore leg.

Keira and her mom, Kelly, live in Thunder Bay, Ontario where they are a two-person family. Without a family doctor, they went to the emergency department. Keira had an X-ray. The emergency physician came back and kept using a word Kelly wasn’t expecting to hear.

Cancer.

“He kept saying, ‘Well, I can’t say that it’s cancer,’” Kelly remembers. “And I’m thinking, this is so weird. Why does he keep saying that?”

Within days, Keira had a bone biopsy. The diagnosis was Ewing sarcoma, a rare cancer that occurs in bone or soft tissue. Less than two weeks after that first visit to the emergency department, Kelly had packed up their lives in Thunder Bay and the two were in Toronto.

There had been almost no time between the ordinary problem they thought they were dealing with — a teenager with a sore leg — and an entirely different life.

“A lot of people who have a rare bone cancer, it takes a long time to get a diagnosis, and that can be problematic,” Kelly says. “Our case was the complete opposite. Our lives turned upside down immediately.”

They had a couple of days to pack for what would become ten months away from home.

Learning a new life in days

The first week in Toronto is difficult for Kelly to describe except as chaos.

Keira needed surgery to have a port inserted into her chest. Kelly was introduced to an oncology team and an orthopaedic team. There were conversations about the bone that would need to be removed from Keira’s leg, 14 rounds of chemotherapy and what the months ahead might look like. There were questions that a parent of a 15-year-old does not expect to be asked: Did Keira think she might want children someday? Did she want to preserve her eggs?

At the same time, Kelly was learning a new vocabulary, new medications and new responsibilities for caring for Keira between hospital visits.

“They give you a lot of information at an extremely overwhelming time,” she says. “You’re learning so much medical terminology, and you’re learning medications and how to monitor things. And of course, you’re scared out of your mind, and your nervous system is fried, and you can’t think straight.”

There was another immediate question: where would they live?

There wasn’t a room available at Ronald McDonald House Toronto when Kelly and Keira first arrived, so they spent their first week at a hotel before moving into the House. Asked what her alternative plan had been if a room hadn’t become available, Kelly laughs at the memory of just how little of a plan there was.

“No plan at all,” she says. “Just a hope and a dream.”

Ronald McDonald House Toronto has 81 rooms for families whose children are receiving medical care in Toronto, and the House regularly operates at capacity. For families arriving from communities hundreds or thousands of kilometres away, the question of where to stay is not separate from the experience of having a seriously ill child. It becomes part of it.

For Kelly, the financial implications were stark. When asked about the costs families can avoid by staying at a Ronald McDonald House, she doesn’t try to calculate what ten months of accommodation, meals and transportation in Toronto would have cost.

Instead, she puts it more plainly.

“Staying at Ronald McDonald House was the difference between worrying about bankruptcy or not,” she says. “Worrying about selling my home, or not.”

Keira at Ronald McDonald House Toronto, where the library became one of her favourite places during her ten-month stay. She read The Book Thief there for the first time.

A life divided between hospital and House

Keira’s treatment was intensive. Her chemotherapy followed a compressed schedule, with two weeks rather than three between cycles. Kelly estimates they spent roughly half their time in hospital and half at Ronald McDonald House Toronto — although even that makes the time outside hospital sound more predictable than it was.

On weeks when Keira wasn’t receiving chemotherapy, they were frequently back and forth to the emergency department.

“I don’t know how much time we actually got to spend in our lovely little apartment,” Kelly says.

After their first month or two, Kelly and Keira were able to move from a standard family bedroom into one of the House’s 15 apartment suites, which are assigned to families based on need and availability. For their two-person family, the additional space changed what was possible.

During one week of each treatment cycle, Keira had to wake every three hours, around the clock, to urinate because one of her medications could damage her bladder. For Kelly, that meant nights with almost no uninterrupted sleep. Later in Keira’s treatment, Kelly’s sister and brother-in-law were able to fly from Thunder Bay and stay with them, helping Kelly through those weeks.

It also meant Keira could have visitors.

Her friends flew to Toronto after her surgery, during a brief break from chemotherapy. They stayed in the apartment with her. They watched movies late into the night. They did each other’s nails. They went out for meals and shopping.

“The girls shopped like nobody’s business,” Kelly says.

It is a small detail, but an important one. Keira was undergoing treatment for a rare cancer. She was also 15.

For teenagers facing serious illness far from home, proximity to medical care is only one part of what is disrupted. School, friendships, privacy and independence are interrupted too. The apartment gave Keira enough space to bring a little of that life to Toronto.

When Kelly later asked her daughter what she remembered most about Ronald McDonald House Toronto, Keira had two answers: the library, and having enough room for her friends to come and stay.

She remembers reading The Book Thief there for the first time.

Kelly and Keira enjoy a movie night at the House. Keira also spent time beading and doing crafts between treatment and hospital visits.

The things that make a hard day easier

There were outings during those ten months, although far fewer than Kelly had imagined might be possible. Keira’s treatment simply didn’t leave much room for them. They made it to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada and The Lion King.

But when Kelly thinks about Ronald McDonald House Toronto now, those aren’t the memories she reaches for first.

She thinks about the staff.

“Honestly, the thing that felt the most memorable was the kindness of the staff. It was constant,” she says. “It was from the very first day that we arrived until the day we left.”

There was the orientation when everything else felt overwhelming. There were staff asking whether they could find something, get something, help with something. There was Heidi at the front desk remembering that Keira loved Hello Kitty and finding stickers for her. There were people encouraging Kelly to make time for a manicure or a massage — something that could easily feel impossible or indulgent when virtually every waking hour was organized around her daughter’s care.

And there was food.

“When you’ve been in the hospital for ten hours and you come back and there’s a homemade meal prepared,” Kelly says, “there’s nothing better.”

She still remembers her favourite: Chef Michael’s white chicken chili.

These can sound like small things when listed individually: dinner, a sticker, a massage, someone at a front desk remembering what your daughter likes. But over ten months, Kelly says, they accumulated into something larger — the sense that someone else was paying attention at a time when she had almost no attention left to spare.

Ronald McDonald House Toronto families now stay an average of 38 days, reflecting increasingly long and complex treatment journeys. Across the House and seven Ronald McDonald House Family Rooms, thousands of families rely each year on practical supports that extend well beyond accommodation — meals, laundry, transportation, programming, places to rest and, often, the simple ability to stop solving the next logistical problem for a few hours.

Kelly wishes she had understood that sooner.

If she could speak to a family checking in for the first time now, she says she would tell them to look beyond the room they have just been given.

“There’s so much on offer. Take the time to really find out what’s there, because there’s so much help and support within Ronald McDonald House,” she says. “It’s so much more than a place to stay.”

Kelly and Keira celebrate with family after Keira rang the bell at the hospital to mark the end of treatment.

Going home is not the end of the story

Keira is home in Thunder Bay now. She is doing well, Kelly says, “mostly.”

The qualification matters.

There can be an assumption that finishing treatment marks a clean transition back to ordinary life. That hasn’t been Keira’s experience. The year after chemotherapy has been slower and harder than Kelly expected. Keira continues to deal with exhaustion, frequent illness and significant brain fog.

She missed all of Grade 10.

This September, she is going to try school again. Technically, she is entering Grade 11, although she still has classes to catch up on. For now, that is enough of a milestone: going back, trying again, seeing what her body and brain are ready to do.

Kelly also knows that their family’s experience is not unusual in Northwestern Ontario. Thunder Bay has a regional hospital, but children requiring specialized care often have to travel to Toronto or London. Kelly says she knows other families in her own extended family who have needed Ronald McDonald House.

That is why the support of people in Thunder Bay matters to her, including the community that gathers each year for the Jordin Jewel Foundation’s annual golf tournament which raises funds for Ronald McDonald House Toronto and Ronald McDonald House Southwestern Ontario.

“We have a great regional hospital, but our kids, when they get sick, we often need to go to Toronto or London,” she says. “I don’t know a single family that has to travel for their child’s care that didn’t need Ronald McDonald House.”

More than a year and a half after the sore leg that changed everything, the House remains part of the Rooney family’s story.

And the Rooney family remains part of the House.