Purple bows appeared on mailboxes throughout Centennial, around Braelinn Elementary School and in other Peachtree City neighborhoods. Purple is 6-year-old Aubrey Ward’s favorite color. The bows became a visible sign of support for a child who, to most people looking at her, did not appear sick. Aubrey still had her hair. She went to kindergarten. She played sports, hugged her doctors and made people laugh. “That’s the problem with DIPG,” her mother, Lisa Ward, said. “Right now she looks great, so people don’t realize how much is going on.” Behind that outward normalcy, Aubrey’s family was preparing to travel across the country in pursuit of an experimental treatment for one of the most aggressive cancers diagnosed in children. At the time Ward spoke with The Citizen, Aubrey had completed six weeks of radiation and was preparing for a CAR T-cell clinical trial in California. The treatment would require repeated trips, medical procedures and weeks away from home—all while Ward and her husband cared for Aubrey’s two younger sisters and tried to maintain their jobs. It was the next step in a journey that had begun only months earlier with an unusual movement in Aubrey’s eye. Ward first noticed the eye movement in March, shortly after the time change. She initially wondered whether Aubrey was simply tired. Then Aubrey’s kindergarten teacher noticed the same thing and recorded a video of it. Ward called an eye doctor and was given an appointment in April. Because Aubrey had no…
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