Michelle and Cameron Turner remember daughter Flo
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00:00 If you had to sum it up in one sentence, you'd say that she marched the beat of her own drum.
00:07 And she really loved to do her own thing.
00:09 She was smart, she was clever, she was intelligent.
00:12 She just knew how to handle animals as well. She was the boss.
00:16 They knew it as well. They were like, "Oh, she's coming."
00:20 She was a force of nature. These sort of older doctors that you think, "Okay, this doesn't feel right. Why are these guys saying, 'Come into this small room and have a chat'?"
00:36 And the shakes started coming on because I could sense it. I could feel it was good news.
00:42 I was just holding onto my seat because I was like, "Where's this going? What are we going to hear here?"
00:50 And she just said, "We've found a large mass on Flo's brain."
01:00 We'd already had a chat with him and he said, "From the scan that I saw, I think you're looking at DIPG, but I hope it's not because that's the worst diagnosis you can have."
01:12 And then on Monday, they did the biopsy. We got the result. He came in to us, we met him, and he said, "It's DIPG."
01:21 For someone to tell you that this is terminal, your child will die from this, you don't accept that. I didn't accept it.
01:31 I always was, "This is Flo. All my friends would say it. This is Flo. She's something else. This girl is a force. Something like this is not going to knock her out. It's not. It's not going to happen."
01:48 And I always held onto that. It took a year of me researching every single night, looking for survivors every single night.
01:58 That's how I would cope. My anxiety was focused on the research and then it would dawn on me.
02:04 Every single scientific paper I would read, the first introduction was always diffuse intrinsic blight.
02:11 Pontingioma is deadly. It's the most deadly form of cancer you can get. The survival rates are zero.
02:19 And that floored me every time I had to read. I always kept hope by just thinking that Flo would be the survivor, but she wasn't.
02:30 It took a year of me finally coming to the conclusion, "We are going to lose Flo."
02:35 I think when Flo was born, she taught me that people are born kind and generous.
02:44 I just thought, "It's something that you learn to be from your parents or around you."
02:49 But she was just born that way. Just have that nature.
02:52 So I think we want to live like Flo did. She was generous and she was kind and we would know that she wouldn't want anyone else to be sad or to go on this journey.
03:04 She hated to see anyone cry, didn't she? It made her really upset. She didn't like it.
03:10 So we thought, "We don't want any other family to have to go through this journey."
03:16 It is traumatic. It will never be the same again. It's just so unfair for a child to have to suffer that way.
03:26 Because it's rare, there needs to be more research and there needs to be more funding.
03:34 They don't even know the reason why it happens. I guess they don't know with many cancers, but specifically with DIPG, there's just nothing out there.
03:43 There just needs to be way more awareness of it.
03:49 So we think if we can raise as much funds as we can towards the fight like other families are doing, then that's going to make a big difference.
04:00 It's all helping. The cure will come through science and research 100%.
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