If children have the ability to ignore all odds and percentages, then maybe we can all learn from them. When you think about it, what other choice is there but to hope? We have two options, medically and emotionally: give up, or fight like hell.

Armstrong contrasts adult, statistical thinking (“odds and percentages”) with the way children often persist in hope despite grim forecasts. The quote frames hope not as naïve optimism but as a deliberate stance in the face of uncertainty—especially in medical crises—where prognosis can tempt resignation. By reducing the response to two choices (“give up, or fight like hell”), it casts endurance as both an emotional discipline and a practical strategy: continuing treatment, advocacy, and daily effort. The appeal to learning from children suggests that courage can be modeled as a kind of imaginative refusal to let probability dictate one’s will to act.