This 7-Year-Old Survived COVID and More. Now She’s Battling Cancer.

Seven-year-old Hattie Shell is what her mother calls “the rarest of baby unicorns,” a youngster who went from COVID to a multisystem inflammatory syndrome to an immune disorder and cancer that invaded her brain and spinal fluid.

“They said the likelihood of all of these things happening to one child at the same time is just unheard of,” her mother, Kady Shell, told The Daily Beast on Friday.

But what is most rare about this little girl from rural Tennessee is the spirit she has maintained in the face of her prolonged and continuing ordeal.

“Where did this self assured bravery come from?” her mother wrote in a Faceobook post this week. “How does she comply with every request of her doctors and us with little to no complaint? How does the thought of going ‘back to the hospital’ not send her into full panic?”

The mother continued, “She is sedated to get ‘shots’ in her spine on a regular basis. She has had tubes inserted to and removed from blood vessels (multiple times) in both arms, both legs, her abdomen, her wrist, her lungs, and her nose. (She calls the scars from these tubes her "dots" like it's no big deal).

“She walks around with ‘lines’ hanging out of her chest—EVERY DAY. They are connected to a tube that is stitched (under her skin) directly into a blood vessel in her neck. The bandage used to keep this clean and secure has to be changed EVERY week. The adhesive on this ‘dressing’ is painful to remove.”

“Her daily meds taste HORRIBLE—like vomit inducing horrible, but somehow she breathes her way through it and has never missed a dose. I haven't even mentioned how the logistics of her life are constantly in flux (back and forth to the hospital, long periods out of school, long hospital stays, etc).... and yet.... even at SEVEN years old..... she perseveres.”

As has been recounted by The Daily Beast, Hattie fell ill last summer when symptomatic COVID triggered MIS-C (multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children). She spent eight days on a ventilator in the ICU at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital in Memphis and was about to be discharged when she crashed and spent another two weeks in the ICU. She at one point managed to say “momma” when intubation should have precluded her saying anything.

She was then transferred to the nearby St. Jude Children’s Research Center. She had been there four hours when both her lungs collapsed. She was diagnosed with a rare immune system disease called hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH) that proceeded to demonstrate why it is as dreaded as it is unusual.

“Her kidneys were not functioning properly,” Kady said. “She was retaining fluid in her abdomen so she had a drain put in. At One point she had a full [impacted] bowel and was vomiting fecal matter around her breathing tube.”

The doctors determined that the HLH had been triggered by Anaplastic Large Cell Lymphoma/Leukemia.

“This combination of diseases is unheard of,” Kady noted on Facebook. “Doctors have described the likelihood of this happening to one child as less than 2% of 2% of children in the world.”

The medical team began with targeted chemotherapy. Hattie tolerated it well enough that she was finally discharged from St. Jude’s in early October. She had been hospitalized for a total of 2 months and 5 days.

“So... we did a thing this weekend... possibly the greatest thing we've ever done!” Kady reported on Facebook. “WE BROUGHT OUR BABY HOME! We will still be going to St. Jude almost daily for blood work, various clinic appointments, and rehab visits, but what an easy drive to make when our girl is healthy enough to come back home. Our house is full of medical supplies/equipment, wheel chairs, and a slew of new medications, but our girls fell right back into their sister/bestie groove. Hattie slept through the night for the first time in almost 9 weeks last night and rolled in her wheelchair to check on her chickens this morning!”

Kady told the Daily Beast that the doctor’s expected it would take three-plus months for Hattie to be able to walk and do normal things again.”

“She's been walking (since) three weeks, post-discharge,” Kady reported.

That was just in time for Halloween, and Hattie announced what she wanted to be. Kady mounted an internet search for a costume even more unusual than a baby unicorn. She found it.

“Only one exists in the world,” Kady reported.

A child who should have been able to cross a room set off trick-or-treating as a blue owl.

“She walked herself house to house,” Kady remembered.

Kady credits her older daughter, Hazel, with Hattie’s remarkable progress. The girls were born 19 months apart and have always been extremely close. Hazel continually urged Hattie to join her in going somewhere and doing something.

“Hazel was so patient and encouraging with her,” Kady recalled. “Hazel’d say, ‘I’m gonna go, you wanna go with me? I’ll go slow.’ Hazel would go as slow or as fast as Hattie could. It was constant, it was all day.”

“The therapists at St. Jude said they think Hazel is a much better therapist than they are. They were like, ‘OK, well, I guess you just need Hazel. You don’t need us.’”

Hattie was happily settled in back home.

“We’re on four acres out in the country,” Kady noted. “We’ve got chickens and mini-horses and rabbits and a dog.”

The chickens recognize Hattie and appear to reciprocate her affection for them.

“The chickens come running, sit on her feet for her to pick ’em up,” Kady said.

Then, in November, Hattie began to feel nauseous while slowly bouncing on a trampoline. Kady and her husband, Wes, initially thought their daughter might have a stomach bug.

“But then I just had a feeling, and sure enough…” Kady recalled.

Hattie underwent tests and scans at the hospital.

“I thought we had already lived through the worst experience of our lives, but I'm not sure that's true anymore,” Kady wrote on Facebook. “The doctors at St. Jude confirmed that Hattie's cancer has in fact spread to her brain… They could not comment on what her overall prognosis would be.”

Kady added, “The nausea, vomiting, and headaches are still ongoing as a result of this, and we have yet to figure out how to get it under control. We are at the point now where if she is awake—she is vomiting.”

The medical team shifted to a more aggressive treatment plan that could include a bone marrow transplant.

“We have to get the cancer under control first,” Kady wrote. “Honestly, I think this is what dying feels like. My insides feel shredded into a million tiny pieces. I want to lay down and not get up, but I can’t. Hattie is still here and needs our help. Hazel is still a healthy ray of light who will need us just as much, and I cannot let Wes do this alone.”

Hattie was not yet strong enough for full systemic chemotherapy. The doctors said that in the meantime they would administer intrathecal chemo directly into the spinal canal.

“Within two and a half weeks, there were no cancer cells in her spinal fluid,” Kady told The Daily Beast this week. “Hattie will continue the intrathecal chemo doses, but the team has adjusted those cycles to be bi-weekly rather than weekly. Hattie is feeling good, and we are in awe of God's grace and miracles!”

But the battle was far from over. She still had to undergo “full court press” chemo.

“We expect this to begin around early February and continue for about 6-8 months,” Kady wrote on Dec. 8. “Between now and the start of the chemo cycles, our goal is to let Hattie be as normal as possible. With God's amazing grace and her doctor's blessing, HATTIE WENT TO SCHOOL TODAY!”

Kady reported that she and Wes had “cried, cheered, paced, and hugged over and over today. God has answered our prayers.”

“Hattie has been more herself today than we've seen in so long!” Kady’s post said. “Today is a good day. Today, I am so grateful for a little girl who got to be a normal first grader with her best friends at the sweetest little school.”

As the spinal injections continued, Hattie began to lose her hair. Her sister again demonstrated what their parents call “the Hazel effect.”

“After the girls wash their hair at night, I typically braid it for bed so they don't have wet hair all over the place,” Kady wrote on Facebook. “That's been a little different with Hattie lately, and last night she asked me to see if I could try to braid her hair when I did Hazel's… she said she wasn't sure she had enough but wanted me to try anyway.”

“I did what I could and was so worried Hattie would be sad or upset bc she is very aware that she will be totally bald soon... but in true Hazel form... She ran in the room to check it out and proceeded to tell Hattie that her braid was SO GOOD because it was the world’s tiniest and cutest braid ever... like a ‘baby’ braid!

“Hazel then proclaimed... and if somebody says it’s not the cutest thing ever or it's weird when you don't have hair... you come get your Sis, ok!?”

“Hattie was ecstatic! She loves all baby’ things and the tinier the better!! She even woke up talking about how she had the cutest baby braid last night even though she doesn’t have much hair!”

Kady added in her post, “There is no better team than these two little old lady babies!”

On Dec. 18, Hattie turned 7.

“The birthday we weren’t sure we were going to get,” Kady said.

Then came the Christmas they had not been sure Hattie was going to get. The new year brought scans that would serve as the baseline for the systemic chemo.

“There is ONE residual scar/spot still on her MRI, but she looks great,” Kady reported on Jan. 28 on Facebook. “There is no way to determine if that spot is still cancer—it is miniscule! They honestly believe it is most likely healing tissue.”

She added, “I have felt so confident about Hattie beating this, but every few days the fear still crashes into me like a tidal wave. I know that’s probably normal, but those waves never seem to get smaller, and it's during those times I really think about what life would be like if my worst fear came true. More than anything, it reminds me that whether Hazel and Hattie are on this earth with me for 5 seconds or 500 years, I am so grateful to be their momma. I mean—how did God pick me for these two angels on earth?

On Feb.14, Hattie was admitted to St. Jude for the first blast of systemic chemo. She first underwent surgery to have a line inserted in her neck. The first major chemo was administered that night.

“The teams try to prepare you for side effects like nausea, skin changes, fatigue, or bodily fluid changes (yes pee...but even her sweat and tears change colors through some of this process), and honestly of all the scary things I thought might happen (or still could),” Kady wrote on Facebook.

Hattie’s urine turned bright pink, but she otherwise experienced few of the side effects. Kady was discharged after a few days and kept on happily at school. She entered an art contest and won first place in the pre-k to second grade age group on March 3.

“It's a picture of a beach, because she wants to go to the beach when this is over,” Kady told The Daily Beast.

Four days later on March 7, Hattie was admitted for the second round of chemo. The moment came when Kady looked at Hattie and wondered how the girl who had always been the quiet, timid one had become so unshakably courageous.

“No wonder I don’t recognize my baby sometimes, she’s not a baby anymore,” Kady said.

On Thursday night, Hattie returned home from her latest stay at St. Jude. She woke her mother up on Friday morning.

“She was like, ‘Guess what I did?’” Kady reported. “I made scrambled eggs by myself.”

Wes had been teaching her and had supervised. She likes to add sour cream to make them fluffy.

“You did?” Kady asked her. “Did you eat them all?”

“Yep,” Hattie said.

Kady expects the treatments to be completed by August or September at the earliest. And then Hattie will be going to the beach.