There’s nothing fair about childhood cancer. If there were, baby Fehrgus would have been declared disease-free after his surgery.

If there were, he wouldn’t have fallen sick in the first place, diagnosed when he was just one week old.

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If there were, it wouldn’t have been his mother, Lindsay, of all people, who would have been rewarded with this cruel kind of counter-karma.

So why aren’t the Pender Island mother and son miserable?

OK, Lindsay Landry admits that sometimes it’s pretty hard, spending month after month after month in a Vancouver hospital with a cancer-stricken infant. But then Fehrgus lifts her up.

“He literally spends the majority of his waking hours laughing and squealing with delight,” she says. “It’s really inspiring and encouraging.”

Fehrgus has never seen his home. He was born in B.C. Children’s Hospital on May 22, a week after a scan showed something on his kidneys, and has been there ever since.

The hope back then was that his treatment — four rounds of chemotherapy, followed by surgery — would allow Lindsay, Fehrgus and dad David Hooper to go to Pender after three or four months.

It hasn’t worked out that way. An operation in October was successful in that doctors were able to remove 98 per cent of the 12-centimetre tumour on his spine, but was followed by the disappointing discovery that live cancer cells remained. So it was back to square one with aggressive chemo that is due to continue into January.

If all goes well, Fehrgus’s cycle of treatment will allow him to be sprung from the “big house” — the hospital — in time to spend his first Christmas at Ronald McDonald House with his parents. It will be a while before they see Pender, though.

“I miss everybody a lot,” Lindsay says.

Well, Pender, pop. 2,200, misses Lindsay, too. She has long been a driving force on the island, the one who always rallied the community whenever someone needed help.

“We still haven’t got over the irony of it,” says Pender’s Alix Down. “You choose one person this shouldn’t happen to, it’s her — and Fehrgus.” Alix’s husband, Jo Down, calls Lindsay the island’s version of George Bailey, the Jimmy Stewart character in It’s a Wonderful Life.

The Downs should know. Lindsay was the dynamo behind the fundraising efforts when their then-11-year-old son Henry was diagnosed with cancer in 2011.

Lindsay left Pender for Newfoundland in early 2013, returning with David that September, right around the time she became pregnant. The 36-year-old got work at a gas station and teaching dance, while David got a job at the shopping centre, though he got laid off just as her maternity leave started. She’s still on mat leave, but his employment insurance is running out. Living at Ronald McDonald House is great, but as any family of a child at B.C. Children’s can tell you, Vancouver isn’t cheap when the paycheques stop. “It’s a very stressful time right now,” Lindsay says.

Pender has pitched in. Kids have sold lemonade. People moving house donated the proceeds of their furniture sale. A pizza drive at the pub helped. A trust account was set up at Island Savings. There’s a Friends of Fehrgus Facebook page. “People have been doing whatever they can,” Alix Down says.

Small communities are good that way. When Henry was sick, Alix felt more supported than many of the parents from Vancouver; in the big city you’re an anonymous statistic, but on Pender you’re a real, live neighbour.

Lindsay feels that, too. “It makes it harder to feel sorry for myself when people are thinking of us,” she says. Some other families at B.C. Children’s don’t enjoy that kind of support; this week, Lindsay brought jambalaya to one of the other mothers, a woman who doesn’t speak English.

It’s just another reminder of the indiscriminate nature of pediatric cancer. Children don’t smoke, have lousy diets or choose any of the other risk factors that increase their chances of falling ill. The disease strikes rich families, poor families, dysfunctional families and ones that are plucked straight from a Norman Rockwell painting.

Don’t look for fairness. It could be them or it could be you.