Teenager Shayla Mitchell had come down with a cough that she just could not shake, so she asked her father Tom to take her to the doctor. Tom suspected that Shayla had a sinus infection, so he told her that he would pick her up after school the next day and take her to the doctor’s office.

As soon as the doctor examined Shayla, however, it became clear that she was suffering from something far worse than a sinus infection. Instead, she had a huge cancerous tumor that consumed two-thirds of her chest and caused one of her lungs to collapse.

Tom and Shayla were stunned as they sat in a room at the pediatric oncology unit of Fairfax Hospital.

“We didn’t know it at the time, but we would wind up having our next 450 meals in that hospital, as well as hundreds and hundreds of additional meals over the next couple of years,” Tom said.

Shayla was diagnosed with Stage 4 Hodgkin’s disease at the age of 16. The doctors left it up to Tom to break the news to her. Before he did so, he stopped at an American Indian art store near the hospital and bought a bracelet for each of them.

“I talked with her about everything and nothing. I talked with her about the wind and about feathers and I talked with her about cancer,” he said. “We talked about the word ‘brave.’ We held each other very tight for a very long time. I’m pretty sure we both cried, and we promised each other that no matter what, we would be brave; together we would get through this.”

As Tom put the bracelet on her wrist and put his own on his, he made a promise to her.

“That I would wear my bracelet until the day she was cancer free,” he said. “That for every single night she had to stay in the hospital I would stay with her. That as long as she stayed brave, so would I.”

Over the next few years, the two of them spent hundreds of nights together in the hospital and just as many hours in the chemotherapy clinic. Shayla went through a battery of tests, blood transfusions, radiation, massive doses of nauseating medication and even heart failure just after the chemo treatments began.

Tom recounted, “…her poor little heart quit working, so they had to install a pacemaker/defibrillator into her chest.”

Tom and Shayla were on their way to chemotherapy one day when Shayla started to scream, “Help me Dad! IT’S SHOCKING ME! …IT’S SHOCKING ME!”

Shayla’s pacemaker had malfunctioned and was jolting her with electricity. Tom held onto Shayla tight, even though the malfunctioning device was almost blowing her out of his arms.

“But I refused to let go. I just held her as tightly as I could and just like that,” Tom said. “It stopped shocking her as quickly as it had started, and we rushed to the hospital. It turns out the manufacturer of this device had to recall thousands of them like brakes on a Chevy.”

Shayla underwent a replacement surgery, a failed bone marrow transplant and other procedures until one day, doctors said that there was nothing more that they could do.

“How in the world was I supposed to have this conversation with my darling daughter?” Tom said. “How in the world was I going to be brave enough to tell my daughter she was going to die? … I knew I had to be brave for HER! I did of course have that conversation with her, and as unbelievable as this may sound it turned out to be the most amazing, beautiful, magical, wonderful conversation I’ve ever had in my entire life, and one that I hope you NEVER EVER have to have…”

When Tom stopped talking, Shayla turned to him and whispered, “Am I still brave Dad?” Tom looked at her and saw how tired she was from fighting this disease. That’s when he realized that she hadn’t been fighting for herself. Instead, she had been fighting for him all along.

Shayla passed away a few days later, and Tom is still proud that his daughter fought the disease with everything she had.