3-Year-Old Battling Cancer 'Kicked Out' of Hospital in the Sweetest Way Possible
In general, parents feel a peculiar kind of possessiveness for their children. Little ones evoke a desperate desire to keep the world with all its woes at bay.
It’s not hard to understand why. As adults, parents know the many ways in which life can disappoint, can hurt — and can even kill.
The innocent beauty of childhood makes us want to protect them from that reality for as long as we can. Sadly, in some cases, we can’t.
Little Hadley Gray is one of those cases. According to GoFundMe, her parents, Darrin and Brittany, married in September 2014.
Not long after, little Hadley arrived. She was a bright-eyed bundle and soon grew a gorgeous tangle of wheat-colored curls.
Yet all was not well with the little girl from Jonesborough, Tennessee. She started developing some odd bruises.
During an ordinary checkup, they asked her pediatrician what could be wrong with the two-and-a-half-year-old girl. The doctor drew some blood and ran some tests.
The results must have chilled the Grays to their marrow. Hadley was sick — very, very sick.
She had acute myeloid leukemia, a kind of blood cancer that the National Cancer Institute says tends to progress quickly. It tends to affect the production of red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets.
That explained Hadley’s bruising. Yet what the Grays didn’t realize was the long road they had ahead of them.
They traveled to Saint Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, where Hadley began her treatment regime. That meant multiple doses of chemotherapy.
Soon all of the little girl’s beautiful hair had fallen out. She was bald as the proverbial billiard ball.
But after six months of treatment, six months of living some eight hours away from home, the medical professionals had a message for her. The nurses and the doctors marched en masse into her room one day, and they began to sing.
They chanted, “Our patients have the cutest S-M-I-L-E. / Our patients have the sweetest H-E-A-R-T.
“Oh, we love to see you every day, / But now’s the time we get to say, / ‘Pack up your bags!
“‘Get out the door! / You don’t get chemo anymore!’”
They then threw fistfuls of confetti all over Hadley, who ducked her head in happy confusion. Thanks to the treatment, she’s cancer-free and has very little chance of seeing it come back.
“They’ve given us the gift of continuing on as a family of three with our baby girl,” Brittany told CBS News. “We owe them everything.”
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