It goes without saying that a cancer diagnosis can be one of the scariest events to ever happen in somebody's life. While advancements have been made in terms of ways to treat it, it still signals that a massive medical procedure is in your near future. Worst of all, receiving treatment isn't a guarantee that you'll pull through, or that even if you do, the disease won't return.
It's especially tragic when a child is forced to undergo this whole procedure. Children are supposed to spend their free time running around with friends, watching Saturday morning cartoons, and getting in trouble for staying up past their bedtime. They're not supposed to spend it going to chemotherapy treatments and regular scans to see if they're even going to survive.
Suffice it to say, the children who soldier on through these awful, awful conditions are absolute heroes, and in the case of young Bridget Kelley, her school saw it the same way. When she returned after beating cancer, her classmates (and then some) welcomed her back like the hero she was.
Bridget was diagnosed with lymphoblastic leukemia all the way back in Sept. 2016, and things immediately just got worse. She started seeing a doctor to have a swollen tonsil removed, but an MRI found it was worse than initially thought. She then had to undergo chemotherapy and surgery, before having a stem cell transplant. It's about as bad as it can get.
She was tutored outside of class so she wouldn't miss out on anything, but had to be kept away from other classmates and people due to the possibility of her contracting germs. Thankfully, one of her classmates was still thinking of her.
The classmate (who hasn't been named) had their parents organize a welcoming party for Bridget, hoping to get about 50 people who were initially invited. However, this number soon swelled to 150, and everyone was excited to see Bridget.
Bridget was met by hundreds of students, parents, teachers and police officers, all braving temperatures at 4-degrees to hold signs of welcome and encouragement for the third-grader. When asked about it by The Today Show, her mother Megan simply said:
"We had anxiety about sending her back to school because we were so trained to avoid germs, but it was also such a relief. It's like we're finally on the upswing now that she's allowed to come back."