On the morning of Halloween 2020, 4-year-old Piper Lardes was beaming. It was her favorite holiday and her long-planned witch costume, complete with green face paint and plastic fingers, was waiting for her at home. The only thing standing between Piper and a day of trick-or-treating was a quick doctor’s appointment. At least, that’s what she thought.

However, Piper would not be coming home from the hospital that day. Or the day after. Instead, the doctor’s appointment brought news that would change Piper and her family’s lives forever. That day, Piper was diagnosed with cancer.

“We’ll never forget that moment,” said Bailey Lardes, Piper’s mom. “You never envision that’s going to be your path. It’s the worst-case scenario. You think, that can’t be what’s happening to our kid.”

In honor of Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, the Lardes family decided to share Piper’s cancer journey with The Denver Gazette to raise awareness and promote funding and research for childhood cancer.

Around two months before Piper’s diagnosis, she began having pain in her right arm. She’d wake up in the middle of the night screaming in agony, though X-rays and blood tests couldn’t find anything wrong. Some doctors suggested it was growing pains or night terrors but, after Piper’s arm began trembling and losing function, one doctor discovered a mass in her neck.

The MRI Piper received on Halloween confirmed the mass was a golf ball-sized tumor pressing into her spinal cord, which was causing the arm pain. Later, the cancer was identified as advanced Ewing’s sarcoma, an extremely rare type of cancer that usually occurs in and around the bones.

Piper was immediately admitted to the hospital where she stayed for the next 10 days. During this time, she lost function in both of her arms, underwent countless tests and was put under anesthesia three times in 48 hours. All the while, Piper’s parents and care team worked to choose a treatment plan for the cancer.

“It was a complete whirlwind,” said Doug Lardes, Piper’s dad. “It took a good chunk of days to even fathom it was happening. You’re just going through the motions and doing everything you can and running off pure instinct.”

Doug, Bailey and the care team decided on 14 bi-weekly chemotherapy treatments, a combination of five different medicines and 31 days of radiation. For the next eight months, Piper and her parents spent most of their days at the hospital, whether it was to receive treatment, check lab results or rush to the emergency room every time Piper got a fever.

Piper’s long, blond hair soon fell out, as well as her eyebrows and eyelashes. Her small body accumulated scars from treatments, and she developed a fear of stickers and Band-Aids because they reminded her of the sticker over her port that hurt when doctors pulled it off.

To help get through this, Piper took it upon herself to know as much as possible about what was happening to her. She would ask the name and title of every person in her hospital room, as well as what each medication used on her was and what it did.

One night, when Piper and Doug went to the ER, a nurse asked Doug what medication the ER had given Piper during her last visit. After Doug responded, “it started with a ‘c,’” Piper confidently exclaimed, “Cefepime.”

“Funny enough, before all of this when Piper was 2 years old, she wanted to be a doctor,” Bailey said. “Now, she wants to be a cancer doctor. She says, ‘well, I need to learn all this for when I become a doctor.’”

Piper’s other coping mechanisms included practicing MRIs and accessing ports on her baby dolls, and using breathing exercises and counting to get through pain. And no matter how hard things got, she would always bounce back quickly and rarely complain, Bailey said.

For a few days a month when Piper felt good, she’d return to preschool, pulling her IV fluid bags through the classroom on a rolling pole. For her fifth birthday, Piper’s parents decorated her hospital room with a princess theme and her care team wore tutus and tiaras. The hospital’s support dog, Ralph, also visited to escort Piper down the hallway in celebration.

At the end of June, after more than eight months of constant treatment, doctors said the tumor was gone and Piper was finally declared cancer-free.

“We waited for so long. Since the day of diagnosis, that’s what we’d been working towards,” Bailey said. “To get to that day, it was the biggest relief that we had ever felt.”

After she was cancer-free, Piper raised money to donate toys, blankets and stuffed animals to Children’s Hospital Colorado for the other patients. Doug said she was inspired to do this because, after her first night in the hospital, a little boy next door sent Piper a stuffed penguin to help her feel better after he heard her crying.

“I think that was almost more important to her,” Doug said. “She doesn’t know the magnitude of what cancer really is. She doesn’t know what could have happened. For her, being cancer-free felt small but being able to collect money and things for other kids who are sick was really big.”

Today, Piper, now 5-and-a-half, just started kindergarten and joined her first soccer team. She loves math class, family movie nights, playing with her 3-year-old brother, Nixon, and watching her favorite TV shows, Doc McStuffins and T.O.T.S, which both tie into her medical career aspirations.

Though Piper has been cancer-free for a few months now, her parents said their lives haven’t gone back to how they were before the cancer diagnosis, and they likely never will.

“It just changes your whole view of life,” Doug said.

“There’s still a lot of trauma that we’re all processing,” Bailey said. “Having to get through getting back to normal while carrying those feelings with us.”

Despite this, Piper’s parents said the experience has brought their family closer and realigned their priorities and appreciation for life. And for Piper, the experience has made her stronger, giving her the bravery to comfort her peers in situations that used to frighten her, like a recent tornado drill at school.

This year, for Halloween, Piper is debating between dressing up as Wonder Woman or reprising last year’s witch costume. She is energetic, polite and eager to show off her latest art projects. She’s happy to talk about school, but left the room when her parents started discussing her cancer diagnosis, because, in Bailey’s words, “she’s heard this one before.”

Piper’s treatments aren’t quite finished. She’s currently in the middle of 12 monthly phlebotomy sessions to remove blood from transfusions she received during treatment and, on Sept. 20, she has her first scheduled scans to check for any relapsing. “Some of these things she’ll have tests for the rest of her life,” Doug said.

However, if all continues to go well, Piper’s memories of her cancer experience might be mostly comprised by Ralph the hospital dog and the friends she made in her care team, her parents said. But for those children who are still dealing with cancer, Piper says to be “a lot of bit brave.”

“You don’t have to be scared all the time,” Piper said.