Live like you were dying, isn't that what Tim McGraw sings? Not gonna lie, this story messed me up. It's so sad but also very inspirational in a lot of ways. One 8-year-old boy finally got to live his skydiving dream, checking it off his bucket list. He has terminal brain cancer, but he's not letting that stop him,
Videos by Wide Open Country
His mother said that doctors diagnosed her son Paxton with Pediatric Medulloblastoma at age 5. He only had a lazy eye and headaches as symptoms. Doctors diagnosed him with cancer, saying he needed emergency surgery. For the past few years, Paxton and his family have hoped for a cure. Though he went into remission, the cancer came back. The treatment stopped working.
She told People, "I put him on hospice pretty early on. I wanted his nurses and that team to know him and that way, it wasn't just another Tuesday for them. His nurse comes in and they play ball. They have fun together. And everything is already in place that when he starts getting to be in pain, those security measures are already there. He won't have to suffer. I don't want him to suffer."
Since then, the 8-year-old has been living as much as he can. He's gone on trips to Wyoming, horseback riding, and paragliding, but the one thing he wanted to do was go skydiving. He became excited by the idea after indoor skydiving. His mother said, "He asked 'Can people actually do this outside of a tunnel?' We said yes, and he asked what that was called. I said skydiving and he's like, 'Well I want to do that.'"
8-Year-Old Lives Skydiving Dream
At the time, the 8-year-old's mother didn't even know if it was possible.
"I'm like, 'Buddy, I don't think you can,' because at the time, I knew other kids who had done skydiving, but they did it through part of their actual Make-a-Wish. These kids were teenagers, so I didn't even know if kids could do this," she said.
After a lot of investigating and talking with doctors, the family finally got the go ahead to make the 8-year-old boy's dream come true. His mother explained that it was worth the risk.
"Every consent form I've had to sign for everything ... I mean, he could have died that first day. He could have died in that first surgery. There was so much swelling in his brain and it was under so much pressure that we could have lost him. So reading all these risks of the medical procedures just to save his life and signing these consent forms makes letting him do some of this other stuff a little easier," she explained
She added, "Every time they operate on his brain, there's the possibility he wakes up and is unable to speak or walk. Everything we've done up until this point has been a risk. At least, if anything were to go wrong, it would be on his terms almost."
