3-Year-Old with Leukemia Gets a ‘Daddy Doll’ to Comfort Her at Treatment (Exclusive)

Chelsie Davis was enjoying her life as a mom of two before heartbreaking news turned her family life upside down.

Chelsie and husband Hayden had recently moved to a new area and were enjoying “a really good new group of friends and community in our home church.” Chelsie homeschooled her daughters, Delta and Dani, and made friends with other families through related programs.

Everything changed when Delta came down with a cold she was having trouble recovering from. Several trips to the pediatrician led to few answers.

“The day after Christmas 2023, they sent us to our local hospital to try to run some more tests. And, upon looking at her labs under the microscope, he was like, ‘We need to get you guys to Memphis. We need to get you all to a children’s hospital and get her seen there.’ ”

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It was scary for Chelsie and her husband Hayden to hear, but there was no time to react. They were transferred by ambulance to Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital, where blood work and other testing were performed.

“So we left about two o’clock that morning, the day after Christmas. The next morning, an oncologist from St. Jude came in and told us that it was leukemia. Within just a three-day time period, our world was turned upside down. We got on another ambulance and rode next door to St. Jude,” Chelsie recalls.

“From there, they hit the ground running. We had no time to think about it or process it. Two days after we really found out, she was having her first surgery to have her port placed and her first round of chemo.”

The transitions made it “hard to adjust” for the whole family, with the couple’s older daughter at home with family and friends while they navigated Delta’s health. Finding this out amid the holidays made it so that family and friends were able to pitch in and help out.

“To be apart for a whole month took a toll on all of us. Delta was 3 when she was diagnosed, and her sister, Dani, was 7. They kept my older daughter really busy with Christmas and New Year’s gatherings, and playing with her cousins,” Chelsie says. “They kept her mind off things.”

“And there was never a time that me and my husband Hayden said, ‘We can’t do this.’ It was not an option. We knew that if we wanted her to survive and our family to stay a family of four, this is what we had to do.”

Things became more complex when Hayden had to start going back and forth for work, all while Delta experienced her first “scary” moment.

“About a month into Delta’s treatment, some of the chemotherapy had caused sores in her mouth, which is called Mycositis. One of them got really bad, but you couldn’t see it because it was so far back. We found out she had a brain abscess. She started running a fever, and she lost movement on her whole left side of her body.”

This led to brain surgery to drain the infection. While it was a solution for the abscess, Chelsie and Hayden had no way of knowing what skills might be impaired as a result of how her brain was impacted.

As Delta recovered, there were many moments where she missed her dad and he couldn’t be there. Then, Budsies stepped in and provided Delta with a doll that looks just like her dad, as well as one for Hayden that looks just like Delta.

“She wanted her daddy, but he couldn’t be there. That’s when Budsies sent us those dolls, and she carried it everywhere. Every room that we went in, every appointment we went in, she said, ‘Look, I get to bring my daddy with me today.’ And, in the little doll he recorded, ‘Hey Dani. Hey Delta. You both are my princesses, and I love you so much.’ ”

The special doll meant a lot to Delta. “She would have to play it for all the nurses and all the doctors everywhere we went. She had to show everybody. It was just nice to have a little piece of him there with us, and it definitely helped. She loved it. She still sleeps with it all the time. They actually fight over it,” Chelsie laughs.

It wasn’t long until Hayden was able to make the back and forth more often. Slowly, things started to improve.

“The first weekend he came back, she had still been in a wheelchair, but we were doing a lot of physical therapy and occupational therapy, and she had gotten her leg braces on her left side to help regain her mobility.”

During this time, the family went viral as Chelsie shared a video of Delta walking unassisted for the first time since her surgery.

“I think having Hayden at the end of the little driveway there at housing pushed her. And she’s been walking ever since then. She runs in the yard like nothing had ever happened to her,” the proud mom shares.

“She’s a little miracle. We went through some really, really tough times. And, to see how well she’s doing right now, it’s really nice to see the things that we have prayed for. We’re getting to live those moments where she’s thriving again.”

“She looks healthy, and she’s gained her weight back, and her hair is coming back. It’s her favorite thing. She loves to wash it and we pray over it every time we get in the bathtub, ‘Lord, let her hair grow long, strong and let it stick.’ And that’s her favorite thing to say is, ‘Let it stick!’ She’s excited that it’s back, and she feels a little bit like a normal life.”

Having that normalcy means so much more now that the family has made it through the “lonely, hard” days in the hospital.

“We were finally able to move home this past December, and we got to have Christmas at home. And, we’ve been traveling back and forth. That’s just another milestone that we met and we kept. That’s all you can do, is encourage each other and say, ‘This isn’t forever. If we can push through this hard stuff right now, we’re going to be together again.’ Here we are. We’ve been home for several months. And, it’s nice to have a little bit of normal back.”

Today, the family travels once a week for Delta’s treatments and gets to return home after being declared in remission in March 2024.

“She is in maintenance treatment. We are on week 49 of 120 weeks, so we still have around probably nine months if you count it out. It rotates, but, she gets IV chemo twice a month, oral chemo twice a month. Then, she rotates to steroids. We are really about to start a phase in treatment where it should feel a lot more like normal life, to take oral chemo at home and not have to stay for a few hours and let chemo run through her IV, her port.”

“To be in a place where we didn’t think we were going to get to be and to be able to restart homeschool and go to church and do some fun things, it’s amazing,” she says

“We were able to go [on] our first trip this past weekend for the first time in two years since the cancer diagnosis. And, the things that she kept saying over and over again, she’d say, ‘Mom and dad, thank you so much for letting me come to the beach. I finally get a break from my Budsie,’ ” Chelsie shares.

“And, as much as that hurts, it’s so good to hear her. She knows she’s doing better. And she knows that she’s going to beat it. It was good just to see her being a kid again, not having to worry about if she’s going to be sick, or if she can do this or that.”

Now that she’s getting back to her groove, Delta — who turns 5 in October — is enjoying being a “funny, dancing” little girl.

“She enjoys having a garden and picking vegetables. She loves to play with her sister. Her favorite things to do are riding her little pink four-wheeler and going fishing. She’s a country girl, for sure.”

Good days are a realization of “answered prayers” for Chelsie and Hayden. “We still have our hard days, and I’m sure we’ll continue to until it’s completely over, but it feels good to be here.”

“For me and Hayden, it hasn’t been easy seeing your daughter not being able to get up out of bed, or not being able to eat, that is the worst feeling, and you just want to take it away. But, we have clung to each other, and to our family, and our support system, and into the Lord, and he has carried us all the way through, and we know that he’s going to do it all the way until the end. And she’ll have a really great story to tell one day when she’s ready,” Chelsie says.

“It’s definitely not easy. It’s not over with, but we’re going to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and it’ll be over before we know it. We hope that we can just be there for somebody else and encourage other people that are going to have to face this, because we’re in this walk and fight right now, but there will always be someone that has gone before us and people that are going to come to this journey behind us. We want to be there to support them through it too.”