3-year-old Kellan Tilton of Detroit, Maine, who has been in a wheelchair his entire life, never had dreams of meeting a celebrity or visiting a far-away destination when wish-granters from Make-A-Wish asked him for his biggest dream.
Instead, Kellan, who was born with a cancerous tumor on his spine and abdomen, asked for wish-granters to help him build a 200-foot long pathway from his family’s home to the barn, where his father and seven siblings spend a lot of their free time.
The pathway will be formally unveiled at a “Wish Reveal Party” this weekend. It will allow Kellan to play outside his family’s home on his own.
“For him, it was about freedom and mobility,” Kellan’s father, Dan Tilton, told ABC News. “Before the path, he had to wait and could only go out if he was carried.”
Shortly after Kellan’s was born, Tilton says midwives discovered something wrong with the newborn’s legs. Tilton and his wife, Elizabeth Tilton, rushed their son to the local hospital, from where they were moved to the Boston Children’s Hospital for specialized treatment.
There, doctors discovered the tumor in Kellan’s abdomen and spine was cancerous. He started chemotherapy on the third day of his life, Tilton said. Four rounds of chemo and a nearly 10-hour surgery later, Kellan was left cancer free and the tumor was removed. Still, the placement of the tumor caused permanent paralysis.
“He’s now a healthy three-and-a-half year-old boy who does well in his wheelchair,” Tilton said.
Kellan’s family has nearly 40 acres of land at their Maine home, though, which presented obstacles for Kellan. But thanks to the generosity of local workers, the biggest of those obstacles has been eliminated.
The six-person Make-A-Wish team partnered with a local construction company, Wireless Construction, Inc., to secure donations from the construction field to have all materials and labor for the approximately $15,000 project donated.
Construction crews broke ground on the project last week and have spent hours laboring, all under the watchful eye of Kellan.
“Every time Kellan was around them, they would pump him up and give him high fives,” Tilton said of the workers, who also let Kellan hammer some nails and drive the excavator.
With the pathway nearly complete, Tilton says his son is already “running” up and down it.
“The first thing he says in the morning is he wants to go out to his trail and run up and down and up and down,” Tilton said. “He calls it running because that’s what it is to him.”
“It’s been overwhelming in such a positive way, the freedom that he has now,” Tilton added. “To see the smile on his face, it’s really priceless to us.”
ABC News contributed to this report.
