[HEARTBREAKING PHOTOS] 5-year-old Girl's Final Days With Brain Cancer

5-year-old Caroline Cronk from Massachusetts, was diagnosed with a type of brain cancer called intrinsic pontin glioma. The disease shuts down pathways that control life functions one by one, like flipping a switch. It also affects the person's motor control and vision and strikes some 200 children a year.

When Rachael Cronk brought her daughter Caroline, 5, to the emergency room one November evening in 2012, it was because her little girl was falling in dance class.
 

She didn't know that tumour in her brain was already affecting her daughter's motor control and vision.
 

Rachael had thought it might be Lyme disease, or one of the thousand other dread possibilities that run through a parent’s mind and almost always turn out to be nothing, according to a report in the Boston Globe.

As Rachael and her husband Kevin, of Norwell, Massachusetts, awaited the results of an MRI and the evening wore on, she told her husband it would be better for him to go home and look after Connor, their 7-year-old son.
 

There was a mass, the doctors said. All feeling left Rachael’s body. When they left, a cry of disbelief escaped her, and she collapsed to her knees.
 

After that point the brave Massachusetts family let the local newspaper into their homes, a photographer documented little Caroline's brave battle and ultimate death at the hands of the disease.

For Caroline, there would be treatment, the doctors said, including radiation and steroids, but fewer than 2 per cent of patients diagnosed with the disease survive.
 

That night when she put Caroline to bed, Rachael crawled in with her. She would sleep with her every night from now on.
 

Rachael was accustomed to making things happen. Two per cent was not a big chance, but it was not zero. She would find a way.

Caroline: right with her best friend Lilah Magee

The radiation treatment started soon after at the Brigham and Women’s radiation oncology unit.
Caroline first had to undergo surgery to install a tube in her chest to administer medication and extract blood, and to mold a mask that would fix her head in place while a machine aimed a beam of X-rays at her skull.
 

She was given a large dose of steroids before each treatment to help reduce the swelling that radiation would cause in her brain, but it also made her furious and ferociously hungry.
She wasn’t allowed to eat before the treatments, and she would scream and cry all morning.

There was six more weeks of this, running through Christmas and part of January. She showed what seemed like boundless courage to Rachael. The radiation made her sick, and on the way home once, Caroline threw up in the car.
 

‘You want me to pull over?’ Rachael said. ‘It’s OK, Mommy,’ she replied. ‘I’m fine.’

A month or so later, in February, imaging of Caroline’s brain showed confusing results as the radiation had not shrunk the tumour. But she seemed to be more like the girl she had been before the cancer.
 

Winter turned to spring, and Rachael and Kevin decided to build a swimming pool because Caroline had always been drawn to water and loved frolicking in it.
 

The family organised a birthday party for her ahead of time to celebrate her 6th birthday, just in case she would not make it to the actual day.
 

 Her dance class recital classes were also pushed up as her health was dwindling.

The disease progressed, with new losses almost daily. Caroline’s left arm became clumsy and stopped working. Then her left leg. She started slurring her words, and her facial expressions began to fade.

Not long after, on a Wednesday night in mid-July, Rachael whispered to her daughter: ‘Do you see God?’

Rachael lay next to Caroline on the bed. She could no longer speak and had only slight movements.
‘Is he talking to you?’ Rachael said. ‘Is he calling you?’
Caroline stared back at her mother and slowly nodded her head

Kevin and Rachael said good bye to their daughter after their nine-month struggle to keep her alive. She died on July 18, 2013.

May Her soul rest in peace.