Instagram influencer and blogger Ashley Stock’s 3-year-old daughter has died following a battle with brain cancer.
Ashley shared the heartbreaking news with her 325,000 Instagram followers that her daughter Stevie “took her final breath in our arms” on Wednesday May, 27. Just over a month ago, doctors at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles diagnosed the little girl with DIPG (diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma), which is a very rare and aggressive tumor with a zero percent survival rate.
“For now, I’m overwhelmed with relief that she’s at peace but I’m also feeling crushed by a pain so intense I can’t put it into words,” she wrote. “I let it out a bit at a time, like when you gently twist the lid off a liter soda bottle…releasing the built up pressure a little at a time to keep it from exploding all over the place. I guess it’s like that. I’m twisting the lid on my grief gently. Because if I release it all at once, I don’t see how I could possibly survive.”
“We have complete faith in there being a greater purpose of this tragedy (and it’s already unfolding through your stories of renewed hope), but unfortunately, faith is not a ‘get out of pain free’ card, and that’s okay,” she continued. “I don’t know how to do this, so for now we’ll continue one day at a time held by the grace of God, the support of loved ones and the prayers of strangers who have become friends.”
The toddler was first admitted to the hospital after Ashley and her husband Ben noticed Stevie’s motor functions “rapidly declining” in April. Doctors then discovered that Stevie had a “large mass on her brain.”
At the time, Ashley shared with her followers that after meeting with “dozens of the top pediatric neurologists, neurosurgeons and oncologists,” the little girl would go home to spend time with her parents and two older brothers Wesley, 10, and Sawyer, 7.
Just days before Stevie’s death, the family celebrated her third birthday.
“I’m so grateful we celebrated early because these days she’s hurting,” Ashley wrote in a tribute to her daughter. “Today she stays on the couch in her cozy little corner. Today she gets flush with pain and grabs her head and closes her eyes with a grimace. Today she has seizures and tremors and lethargy.”
Adding, “Her verbal communication abilities are declining more each day but the way she communicates with her eyes holds a wisdom and a knowing far beyond my own. She doesn’t know what’s happening, but she KNOWS what’s happening. And she is brave as hell.”
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