On the outside, Jasmine MacGibbon is doing everything she can to put on a brave face in front of her terminally ill five-year-old son.
She and her husband Karl are trying to keep their time together as fun and light as possible, outside of son Caiden's radiation treatments and hospital visits.
But behind closed doors, her beautiful boy's diagnosis is just a heavy weight to bear.
The West Auckland family's nightmare started at the beginning of last October when Jasmine had noticed something was off with Caiden.
The normally bubbly, cheeky and energetic youngster was not himself.
Caiden wasn't able to chew properly or swallow without choking and Jasmine noticed his speech became slurred.
Little things were adding up quickly, so Jasmine, 41, took Caiden to see his GP and visited Waitakere Hospital on a separate occasion.
But she was reassured. His blood tests looked "pristine" so there was nothing that they could say that was causing these symptoms.
As he seemed to be getting worse, Jasmine decided she needed to seek further reassurance, but she couldn't shake an instinct something was terribly amiss.
She said: "The night before I took him to see a GP in the morning, I was bawling my eyes out for over an hour, telling my husband that I had this horrible, horrible feeling that it was something serious.
"When I took him to the GP that morning, my son could hardly walk."
Adamant something sinister still hadn't been discovered after the appointment, Jasmine decided to take him up to Starship Hospital.
It's a move she will now remember as the first domino knocked down in what became a spiral of uncontrollable anguish for the family.
"I just had this awful gut feeling that it was neurological so I had to take him to Starship and the doctor there was amazing," she said.
Within an hour, doctors found young Caiden had a tumour in the brain stem area.
Jasmine said she will never forget how it felt to hear those words.
Caiden was rushed to have a CT scan and then wheeled back to his room. Jasmine had barely sat down when one of the doctors came in.
The devastated mum recalls: "The look in her eye, I knew. She said to me: 'We need to have a very serious conversation, can you have a support person come up?' I knew it was going to be awful."
While different types of brain tumours and illnesses have varying survival rates, Caiden's does not.
The prognosis of diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG) averages around 9-12 months.
She said: "There is no cure, most people will not survive over two years and there's been the odd person that will survive to five years. It is pure evil.
"When I took him to the hospital I never imagined it would be something they couldn't fix.This is the worst case scenario."
Doctors acted quickly, putting Caiden onto medication to reduce some swelling around the brain.
Caiden underwent two brain biopsies after doctors couldn't get any results from the first test which led to concerns he might not pull through.
A sigh of relief came to learn he did survive, only for the second test to diagnose the incurable tumour.
Jasmine said: "It's the worst one you can have.Your job is to protect your kids, but I can't protect him from this, this is out of my control. There's nothing I can do to save my son."
There's not a day that goes by that the mum-of-three doesn't break down and cry multiple times.
She said: "That's behind closed doors where he can't see, because I don't want him to see.
"It's our job as parents to carry all the worry and fear for our children, so that he can focus on enjoying his childhood, and focus on doing all the fun things kids do."
Dexamethasone — a drug being used to treat Caiden — has made him gain more than 16kg in just two months, restricting his ability to be active and forcing him into a wheelchair.
Watching the decline of his mobility has been tough for the family but they know it's allowing him to have the best possible quality of life.
"He can now chew, he can now swallow, he can do those sorts of things that he couldn't do before," she said.
Every day counts, juggling weekly hospital visits with trying to cram as much as possible into each day.
They're holding out for a miracle, fundraising for his treatment and trying to raise awareness through his Facebook page, while creating special memories with Caiden's sisters Kaylee and Bianca.
Jasmine said: "All these things we thought we had years to do with him, and we don't want to be away from him, because every minute we're away is a minute less that we could have with him. Soaking in every moment is so precious to us."
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