Brain cancer

Keaton Sundeen was diagnosed with diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, a very rare and aggressive type of childhood cancer that forms in the brainstem, ...

“Keaton loved to read and loved to play games,” Sundeen said. “Then they pulled his ventilator tube at about 10 that evening,” she said. Sundeen said she checked on him at 8 a.m. and his temperature had risen to 103.4 degrees. “Everybody seemed like it would be no problem,” she said. “We could see a little bit of improvement after he had finally gotten some nutrition,” she said. The Sundeens had planned a trip to Florida in 2020 that eventually got booked in 2022 because of the coronavirus pandemic. The family eventually received a call from a Mayo Clinic doctor who was doing a clinical trial where instead of doing all six weeks of radiation at one time, it was broken into chunks of two weeks each, Sundeen said. “You could tell his health was starting to decline like he hadn’t eaten anything really or kept anything down.” “So we decided to take him into the emergency room.” After Keaton’s fall on April 27, Sundeen said he ate breakfast at the school the same day and was doing fine. Sundeen said Keaton would wake up and vomit for the next two days. Keaton was eventually diagnosed with diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, and Sundeen was told her son had six to 12 months to live.