In 2021, Christine Tizzard, now 47, started experiencing a locking jaw, tinnitus-like symptoms, hearing loss and headaches. Tizzard’s oncologist told her that these symptoms were latent effects from radiation that she’d received years earlier for a benign tumour. But the symptoms kept getting worse.

In early April, a Toronto neurosurgeon said she wasn’t sure if it was cancer and that she might operate but would first need a biopsy, which would take several weeks.