NEED TO KNOW
- At two years old, Alisha Openshaw’s identical twin sons, Weston and Bennett, were diagnosed with cancer
- For the next three years, the twins were in and out of the hospital constantly
- Now, Alisha is opening up about her family’s journey through cancer, and how things are for them now, in the wake of such tragedy
When Alisha Openshaw’s son, Weston, was around two, he started to get sick — all the time.
It was a constant rota of infection, recovery and then a new infection, and Alisha could feel that a diagnosis was on the horizon for her child.
“Obviously, your mind never goes to cancer. It’s a fleeting moment of, ‘Could this be cancer? No, that’s so unrealistic.’ And then you shift your mindset,” Openshaw tells PEOPLE.
In April of 2022, the Openshaws received an official diagnosis for Weston, then 1: acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
“I really knew nothing about leukemia,” Openshaw recalls of finding out about her son’s diagnosis. “I knew it was a cancer, but I didn’t know what treatment looked like or what the prognosis was, so it was just terrifying to hear that your kid has cancer.”
After being transferred to the local children’s hospital in Vancouver and meeting with an oncologist, Alisha made sure to ask point-blank: if leukemia was a cancer of the blood, and what were his identical twin brother’s chances of developing the same cancer?
Alisha says she was told 20%.
“But at the time, I didn’t really have the mental capacity or emotional capacity to even entertain that idea that possibly they could both get this diagnosis,” she remembers.
Weston started treatment the same day, beginning to receive chemotherapy in the hospital. After the first few months of chemotherapy, Alisha says, Weston was able to go home and do treatment while going back and forth from the hospital. Once Weston was able to come home, Alisha finally let her mind wander toward the possibility that his brother, Bennett, could also be diagnosed.
Nearly four months after Weston’s diagnosis, the family received Bennett’s.
Because Weston was being treated, the oncologist at B.C. Children’s Hospital was also monitoring Bennett, doing bloodwork occasionally for him as well. His first few tests came back normal, Alisha recalls.
“Then, slowly, his blood work started looking a little bit off and then just shy of four months later, we were taking Weston in for a scheduled admission. So, he was being admitted to the hospital and they said to bring Bennett in as well,” Alisha remembers. She recalls having an “inkling” in the back of her mind that “something bad is coming.”
So, she packed for both boys to go into the hospital.
“A little piece of me was like, ‘Just pack so that you’re ready if the ball drops,'” she recalls.
Her whole world stopped. After being in the oncology world for four months at this point, her family’s life became about getting their two sons through treatment.
The oncology team was shocked, Alisha says, noting how rare it is for two twins to be diagnosed and treated simultaneously. Alisha and her husband also have another child, their oldest. However, other than the identical twin aspect of Weston and Bennett’s siblinghood, Alisha was told that there was no higher risk for him.
“It’s not like adult cancers that have environmental or lifestyle factors,” she explains, wryly. “Childhood cancers are just luck of the draw.”
Together, the boys were in treatment for three years, and the family learned to navigate an entirely new world.
“I was just dropped into this world that I knew nothing about,” she says, despite her work as a paramedic. “I have a little more base knowledge than your average parent.”
Because boys were so young — just two — when they were diagnosed, Alisha describes their perhaps unusual reaction to their treatment.
“They didn’t really know any better,” she says. “To them, they thought that every other two-year-old goes to the hospital every day and gets chemo and has to relearn to walk and has to get feeding tubes and all these things because they saw each other doing it.”
There were times when the twins didn’t want to take their medication and would rather have been normal kids out playing on the playground. It was difficult for Alisha to “force” them to take medications or go into the hospital. Some moments in treatment were so painful that Alisha even has a hard time looking back on them now.
Alisha herself found a new sense of normalcy in her new community.
“You create some pretty special bonds with people when you’re going through such a nightmare together and so you feel separated from the rest of the world,” she says. “I really leaned on the other moms and the other families.”
Posting to her social media accounts, called Twincredibles Fam, which she started “from a dark hospital room,” was another way that Alisha found community. On TikTok, the mom has over 41,000 followers.
“And so we share our story on social media and for our children’s hospital, we share our story to help bring in donors and raise awareness,” she says.
“I find that social media has been a way for me to heal because it’s been my creative outlet. So I started our TikTok account from a dark hospital room. I was just in this small hospital room for weeks and months at a time, and it was a way to process my feelings.”
Juggling the twins’ medical procedures with the care of her other child was also incredibly hard.
“The mental load of trying to keep his life normal and trying to make sure that he still felt included and loved and not just abandoned because his two little brothers were fighting cancer,” she said.
The reality of the twins’ situation overtook her life in every way, Alisha describes. She stopped working to be there for her children, and her husband, who was self-employed, took over the task of supporting the family financially.
“I feel like I was just their nurse, I couldn’t be their mom,” she says. “Kids are dying from cancer literally every single day, and you don’t think about it when you’re not in that world because it’s too painful.”
But for Alisha and her family, thinking about it wasn’t a choice.
While the three years that the two boys were in treatment for cancer brought countless “horrific” twists and turns to the family, in the fall of 2024, both boys were declared in remission.
Alisha recalls watching both of her boys, side by side, as they underwent treatment over the three years, detailing how Weston’s diagnosis of cancer in his spinal fluid put him at high risk with many more setbacks and side effects. The now six-year-old had to relearn to walk four times during his treatment, whereas Bennnett, Alisha tells, never stopped walking.
After Weston completed his treatment in October of 2024 and Bennett in August, the pair started kindergarten — having otherwise been unable to attend preschool throughout their treatment.
Though the transition was daunting for Alisha, who had spent every waking and sleeping moment with her sons for the last three years, she says it was “beautiful” to see how the two thrived in school.
“Now they’re six, and it’s interesting because, when I pull up videos or pictures on my phone of when they were sick, they don’t remember a lot of it,” Alisha says.
“Which is a trip for me. I don’t forget a single second of any of that and how hard it was and they’ve moved on. And now that they’re healthy and they’re done treatment and they’re in remission, now I’m unraveling and processing all of the trauma and grief that we’ve been through.”
The anxiety never truly goes away, Alisha shares. The first year in remission is the most likely time for a relapse to occur, but the chances grow smaller and smaller as the years go on. In five years, barring any relapse, the boys will be able to say that they are cancer-free.
“This is their life, and it’s just normal to them, but sometimes I wish I could be like, ‘You guys, you have no idea what you’ve just gone through. This is so incredible. You guys have such a story to tell,’” Alisha says.
Slowly but surely, despite the twins’ being in remission, Alisha is allowing herself to look toward the future.
“For so long during the course of their treatment, I didn’t let myself think about their future because I was so scared that they wouldn’t have a future,” she says.
“I’m just getting to the point now where I’m starting to be able to picture what our future will look like. And obviously, I want us all to live long, healthy, happy lives. But it’s scary at the same time. I think anyone who’s been through something traumatic, you will always worry about the rug being pulled out from underneath you again.”
And yet, Alisha says, she and her family have been able to “grow” from the experience.
“There was this one quote that I held in my mind or just that kept popping up in my mind throughout the course of their treatment,” she explains. “The saying, ‘Grow from it.’ I just kept telling myself, ‘You have to grow from this. You have to grow from this. So we’re going to get through it and we’re going to grow from it.'”
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