Charlize Hyser

Last Thanksgiving, Charlize “Charlie” Hyser was a 15-year-old sophomore at Buffalo High School when something began to feel wrong. She started losing feeling in her right arm and shoulder. As the weeks passed, the weakness progressed, and numbness and tingling developed in her hand. After multiple doctor visits, an MRI on February 6, 2026, finally revealed the devastating reason why.

That same day, Charlize was admitted to Children’s Minnesota. She underwent major brain surgery to remove as much of the tumor as safely possible, but what remained brought a diagnosis no family is prepared to hear: diffuse midline glioma (DMG), an aggressive brain tumor with painfully limited treatment options. Nearly one month later, Charlize celebrated her 16th birthday in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit.

In a matter of weeks, the ordinary life of a teenage girl had been replaced by hospitals, procedures, and an uncertain future.

But to understand Charlize’s story, you first have to understand Charlie.

She is funny, fiercely loving, and completely herself. She keeps a close circle of friends, but once you’re in, you’re in. She’s happiest laughing with her friends, having fun, or hanging out with her two beloved Bullmastiffs.

Her mom, Kira, describes her as “the biggest, spiciest, tiniest little meatball — who ironically doesn’t even like meat.”

“She has the biggest heart,” Kira shared. “She loves hard. She loves love. She is as real as they come.”

To the world, she is Charlize. To the people closest to her, she is Charlie — or, to her family, “Charlie Bear.” Over the course of her treatment, that distinction has come to mean even more. People meet Charlize, but when she lets someone close enough to call her Charlie, they’ve been welcomed into a very special circle.

A Fight Without a Finish Line

Following surgery, Charlize faced serious complications and needed a tracheostomy and feeding tube, as well as another surgery. She went on to complete six weeks of radiation before spending four weeks in intensive inpatient rehabilitation at Gillette Children’s.

There, her recovery started with the most basic of milestones: learning to hold her head up again. Significant weakness on the right side of her body, along with nerve pain, fatigue, nausea, and other complications, meant rebuilding skills she had once taken for granted. With determination, Charlize progressed to relearning how to walk and eat, while adapting to using her left hand when her right no longer worked as it once had. Step by step, she began regaining strength, mobility, and independence.

And through it all, Charlie kept showing up.

“She gets out of bed, she smiles, she laughs,” Kira said. “She brings joy to everyone.”

Today, Charlize is enrolled in a clinical trial at Children’s Minnesota. Unlike many cancer treatment journeys, however, there is no predetermined end to treatment for DMG — no date circled on the calendar when everything is expected to be over. Her family’s hope is that her current treatment continues to work and, when she needs another option, research will have created one.

For Charlie, that need is deeply personal.

Speaking about her future and the possibility offered by clinical trials, she shared a hope no 16-year-old should have to articulate: “Maybe with the clinical trials, I’ll live past five years.”

Getting To Know Charlize

Cancer has taken much from Charlize, including pieces of the independence and freedom that should come with being 16. She misses school, her friends, and the ability to simply get into a car and go somewhere without considering accessibility, medications, appointments, or how she might feel that day.

As Kira puts it, “She misses the freedom of not having to think about cancer.”

But cancer hasn’t taken away the qualities that make Charlize who she is.

Throughout treatment, her hospital room has somehow become a gathering place. Nurses, therapists, doctors, social workers, administrators, and others stop by—and often end up staying. Conversations turn into laughter, and for a little while, the hospital room feels like something else entirely.

Her family calls the ripple she creates “The Charlie Effect.”

It is the way her humor, heart, and determination draw people toward her. It is the way people begin by meeting Charlize and, somewhere along the journey, find themselves getting to know a little bit of the Charlie her family knows and loves.

Perhaps one moment captures her heart better than any other. When Charlize was told she had cancer, one of her first questions was:

“Will my mom and dad get it?”

Even then, she was thinking about the people she loves.

That spirit has helped her family continue finding joy amid unimaginable uncertainty. They still laugh. They go to the lake. Charlie sees her friends. They celebrate good scans and appreciate ordinary days. They make plans and create memories.

“Cancer divided our lives into a before and after,” Kira shared. “Charlize is teaching us how to live in the after.”

Research Means More Time

For families facing DMG, research is not an abstract promise about what might be possible years from now. It determines what options are available when a child needs another treatment.

Charlize’s diagnosis thrust her family into a world they never expected to know — one filled with clinical trials, mutations, eligibility criteria, and experimental treatments. Her parents have had to absorb complicated medical information while simultaneously making extraordinarily difficult decisions for their daughter.

“I don’t want to be an expert in clinical trials,” Kira shared. “I don’t want to understand eligibility criteria, mutations and experimental treatments. I just want to be Charlize’s mom.”

For Charlize’s family, the meaning of childhood cancer research has changed completely since her daughter’s diagnosis. Research means another option when the current one stops working. It means another clinical trial. Another discovery. Another chance.

“Research isn’t something Charlize needs someday. She needs it now.”

And ultimately, what her family wants research to give Charlize is something most families with teenagers have the privilege of taking for granted: time.

Time to turn 17, then 18, 21, and 30. Time to get more dogs than any reasonable person should own. Time to fall in love and have her heart broken. Time to make questionable teenage decisions, change her mind about what she wants to do with her life, make mistakes, and discover who she wants to become.

Kira doesn’t need her daughter to have an extraordinary life.

“I just want my daughter to have the chance to live an ordinary, beautiful, messy, long life.”