Two-year-old Shiann Lockhart isn’t your ordinary two-year-old girl. She was born with a heart defect and has been fighting for her life ever since.
“I didn’t have any issues with my pregnancy,” her mother, Cora Lockhart, said in an NBC report. “She was about 5 hours old and they took her back to the nursery to get her all cleaned up and do her tests. And she coded.”
Five weeks later, Shiann had to undergo a heart transplant to save her life. In two weeks, she was released from the hospital. Her parents thought everything had been fixed.
“She had really good summer last year. She started eating and was growing,” said Cora.
That is, until a year passed and Shiann got terribly ill.
“We took her to the hospital and we thought it was normal viruses,” her mother recalled. “Turns out she got mono, which is the EVV virus. In transplant patients, if you don’t catch it soon enough, it turns into what’s known as PTLD (Post-transplant Lymphoproliferative Disorder) Lymphoma.”
Cora and her husband decided to green-light a chemo, but after their daughter nearly died, they decided to stop with the treatments after a round and a half.
“She has cancer in her brain as well as her whole body so we decided enough was enough. She has been through too much in her short little life to have to deal with any more,” Cora said. “So we made the decision to bring her home on hospice and let her live out the rest of her time here on earth happy and peaceful.”
Instead of letting grief pull them down and just wait for the worst to happen, Cora and Trey decided instead to make the most of the time they have left with their daughter.
They decided to create for her a bucket list of all the big moments a person should have in their life, such as prom, graduation, and wedding.
"Every mother should be able to help their daughter pick out a prom dress and every father should be able to share a dance with his daughter on her wedding day," Cora said.
And so one by one they will attempt to cross off the 73 items in Shiann’s list.
In fact, her family had already organised a prom at their church, where forty friends and family members witnessed Shiann being crowned the prom queen and even sharing a dance with her dad.
On their way there Shiann got to to ride a limousine, number 53 on her list.
Another item on her bucket list was dipping her feet into the ocean, and since she couldn’t, Cora’s friend decided to bring the ocean to her, pouring ocean water into a baby pool where Shiann could take a dip.
"Of course nothing is like actually having Shiann here with us, but celebrating her life with her has been wonderful," Cora said in a Today article.