CUMMING, Ga. — On Friday, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta will hold its 10th annual Cape Day, celebrating some of the littlest heroes fighting battles every day.
Cape Day honors the strength and resilience of patients at Children’s, which are two traits Mallory Hall embodies.
Mallory was part of Children’s first Cape Day 10 years ago, when she was waiting for a heart transplant.
“She had something called dilated cardiomyopathy,” said Mallory’s mom, Jessica. “It just means her heart was enlarged and did really well for a couple of years.”
While Mallory was first at Children’s at 10 days old, things started to look up after some treatments. Her dad, Dustin, said things stayed OK for a couple years, until she was about two and a half-years-old.
“It just became very obvious (she was) starting to deteriorate,” he said.
In 2014, Mallory was part of Children’s first cape day while she waited for a heart transplant for two months.
Early one morning, her dad got the news, Mallory was getting a new heart.
“The first thing I did was I went over to her bed, listened to her heart,” he said. “Knowing it was the last time that I would hear it as hers.”
For 10 years, her dad described Mallory as the perfect transplant patient.
“We checked every box. This is how the perfect story goes,” he said. “Then to have a less than 10 percent chance to have that happen.”
Mallory started having stomach pains. After a visit to the ER, doctors discovered a cancerous mass near her colon, diagnosing her with lymphoma related to Post Transplant Lymphoproliferative Disease.
According to Mallory’s physicians, PTLD is a rare condition that affects roughly 8-10% of solid organ transplant recipients due to the immunosuppressive medications that are necessary to prevent organ rejection.
“You’re angry, especially for her,” Jessica said. “She's been through a lot. So, to tell her again that she has to fight for her life was hard.”
At 11 years old, Mallory said she couldn’t understand why she had to fight another battle.
“I prayed to God a lot. But I started to think, I had a transplant. Now this. Why is this happening to me? And then it was hard to stay optimistic because it was a lot of things going wrong. And I was worried like, this is going to kill me and I didn't know what was going to happen,” Mallory said, with tears in her eyes.
Mallory found hope inside the hospital that made her a hero, all those years ago.
“We had some really good doctors, and I knew they were going to take care of me,” said Mallory.
Jessica said the whole family was in tears when they got Mallory’s diagnosis.
“We're crying, she's crying. And then all of a sudden she kind of pulls it all together. And she goes ‘you know what? If I can survive a heart transplant at two, I can punch cancer in the face,’” Jessica recalled Mallory saying. “And from that moment, we were like, yes, girl, okay, we're going to do it together.”
Mallory did just that on October 8 when she beat cancer, got to ring the bell and go home.
“She’s kind of everything that Cape Day is supposed to be about,” Jessica said. “She's the bravest kid I know.”
“She's the epitome of a superhero,” her dad added. “She has a cape on every day.”
Mallory hopes the kids that are part of this year’s Cape Day will "just keep fighting."
Her compassion for kids at Children’s spans beyond the Cape Day superheroes. Mallory said she used to want to be a zoologist when she grows up. Now, she wants to be a nurse at Children’s to help kids just like the nurses there now have helped her.