PARALYZED 3-YEAR-OLD BOY HAS HIS WISH FULFILLED

 

Make-A-Wish builds pathway for Kellan Tilton so he can move around his family's property with ease.

When the Make-A-Wish Foundation approached Kellan Tilton, promising they'd try to fulfill his deepest desire, the 3-year-old could’ve asked for anything in the world: a trip to Disneyland, perhaps, or a meeting with his favorite athlete or celebrity.

But Kellan had something else in mind. He told the organization that all he wanted was a way to easily get from his Maine house to the barn on the property where his dad and his seven siblings spend a lot of their free time.

Make-A-Wish happily obliged.

"He could have taken a trip anywhere," the organization’s marketing director Sonya Purington told CBS News. "For him, what was most important was to be able to go outside and -- as he said -- 'wheel myself from my house down to the barn.'"

Kellan uses a wheelchair to get around. When he was born, doctors discovered a cancerous tumor in his abdomen and spine, prompting several rounds of chemotherapy and a nearly 10-hour surgery to remove the growth.

Kellan is now cancer-free, but the position of the tumor left the child paralyzed from the waist down. Kellan can drive his wheelchair "better than anybody can drive a car now," said his dad, Dan Tilton; but the boy still has difficulty at times getting around the family's property. 

“For him, it was about freedom and mobility,” Tilton told ABC News of Kellan's wish to have a passageway linking the house and barn. “Before the path, he had to wait and could only go out if he was carried.”