For Santa Clarita natives Cardon and Brittany Ellis, every day has been a struggle as they watch their 15-month-old baby girl, Elisabeth, fight for her life.

The Ellis family’s world was turned upside down Feb. 2 when they received an urgent phone call from their pediatrician telling them that a precautionary ultrasound had revealed a biomass the size of a tennis ball inside baby Elisabeth’s head.

Baby Elisabeth after her emergency brain surgery.

“I will never forget where I was standing when I got that phone call,” Cardon Ellis told KHTS on Thursday. “(The doctor said), ‘I booked her in the E.R., you need to leave right now — this is life threatening.’”

After countless doctors and tests over the next few days, Elisabeth was diagnosed with an aggressive and rare cancerous tumor called Choroid Plexus Carcinoma and rushed into emergency surgery.

The diagnosis was a complete shock to the Ellis family, as their seemingly healthy baby girl had shown no signs or symptoms of illness in the days leading up to it aside from a slightly larger than normal head, which the family initially attributed to genetics because her father is nearly six and a half feet tall.

“Most kids that get it, they have symptoms for months,” Ellis said. “There’s all of these symptoms that they have that baby Elisabeth didn’t have. She was just a completely happy, healthy, normal kid that was hitting all of the developmental markers. She was clapping, she was starting to talk — the whole nine yards.”

Pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Mark Krieger was able to remove only 35 percent of Elisabeth’s tumor after eight hours of surgery at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, and now the baby girl is enduring chemotherapy in an effort to shrink it down further.

Baby Elisabeth.

Ellis described the chemo treatment as “brutal,” noting that a few of the side effects Elisabeth has suffered through include vomiting, mouth sores, a rash that resulted in the family being quarantined inside her hospital room, and an itchiness so intense that the baby girl is scratching her own skin off her entire body.

If that wasn’t enough, because of Elisabeth’s young age and still developing brain, the chemotherapy may cause a number of medical issues later on, including significant hearing loss, cognitive problems, eyesight loss, leukemia and infertility.

“It’s more than just losing your hair,” Ellis said. “When you’re a kid, you can’t communicate. She was so irritated she’s scratching her skin off. It’s brutal.”

At this point Elisabeth has a 50 percent chance of survival, which Ellis said has left him feeling like a pot of water on the verge of boiling over as life continues to move forward.

“That’s where you are constantly as a parent. You can’t get your mind off it,” he said. “Everything shuts down… I run a family business and fortunately my family has been insanely supportive — they’ve reduced my hours so I can spend a lot more time at the hospital — but I mean, how well can you concentrate at work when you know that your daughter has a 50 percent chance at life?”

Elisabeth with her mom, Brittany Ellis.

In addition to the support of his family, Ellis and his wife have gotten overwhelming support from the community, who have rallied together to raise more than $55,000 toward Elisabeth’s medical bills through a Go Fund Me page set up by a family friend.

A fundraiser is also planned for Monday, March 13 at Sharky’s Valencia, where 20 percent of all proceeds from opening to closing time will go to the Ellis family. The hashtag #BeElisabethStrong has also surfaced on social media in support of the Ellis family.

“A lot of people ask, ‘What can we do to help?’ and sometimes you don’t know that answer, because you don’t even know everything that’s wrong yet,” Ellis said. “We’re just still kind of in the shell shock phase, because this did just happen.”

Though Elisabeth’s Feb. 2 diagnosis was only a little over a month ago, it’s been the longest month of the Ellis family’s lives.

“Every day of this process, there has been something that immediately needed to be done the next day — a new doctor we needed to meet, a new permission we needed to sign, a new thing that needed to be done,” Ellis said. “Literally we have lived at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles this entire time.”

Elisabeth with her dad, Carden Ellis.

Another struggle Ellis and his wife are facing as parents is attempting to spend time with their three-year-old son, Ryder, who isn’t allowed in Elisabeth’s hospital room during flu season.

While Ellis has been able to take Ryder with him to work some days, he said the situation is heartbreaking because Ryder can’t fully understand what’s going on with his sister.

“It’s sad, because whenever we go somewhere … he’ll look at you like, ‘Are you going to come and stay with me? Are you going to leave me?’” Ellis said. “He’s struggling with that whole (thing). He is loved, but he feels rejected.”

For now, all Ellis and his wife can do is continue to move forward, take things one day at a time and try to be strong for their children.

“Love your kids,” he said. “I’m grateful that I did spend a lot of time with them before this happened — so much so that when it came time to be a comfort as best you can, at least that’s the way they view you.”

When asked if there is anything else Ellis would like to share about his devastating situation, he replied, “It’s just tough. I don’t understand it… For now, you’re just kind of shell shocked and exhausted and it’s tough. That’s all that you can say.”

To support baby Elisabeth and the Ellis family, click here to donate to the Go Fund Me page and click here for more information about the March 13 fundraiser at Sharkey’s Valencia.

All photos and videos courtesy of Cardon Ellis.