Lily is five years old.
She should be learning to ride a bike, losing baby teeth, and counting down the days to the holidays.
Instead, she has already been put under anesthesia 25 times.
Since she was just eight months old, Lily has lived with a rare and painful condition — a venous malformation growing inside her left cheek and lip. It’s a tangled mass of abnormal veins that swells, aches, and changes as her face grows, creating constant medical risk in a place no child should ever have to fear.
Every three months, like clockwork, Lily has been taken back to the hospital.
Another procedure.
Another round of anesthesia.
Another recovery.
By the age of five, her tiny body has endured more than most adults ever will:
- 19 separate treatments
- Five debulking surgeries
- Removal of her tonsils and adenoids
- An emergency appendectomy at just three years old
And through it all, doctors told her mother the hardest words to hear: this would be lifelong.
That Lily would grow up in operating rooms.
That anesthesia would be routine.
That pain and procedures would simply be part of her childhood.
For years, Amanda, Lily’s mom, accepted that reality — not because it felt right, but because it felt unavoidable. She learned the rhythms of hospital life, the signs of swelling, the quiet fear that comes with watching your child disappear behind operating room doors again and again.
Then something changed.
Specialists in Italy reviewed Lily’s case — and for the first time, her family heard words they had never been offered before:
This can be fixed.
Doctors explained that a treatment called electro sclerotherapy could stop the malformation entirely — not manage it, not slow it, but end it. It could spare Lily from decades more surgeries and allow her to grow up without a medical calendar defining her life.
There was only one catch.
The treatment is only available in Italy.
And each procedure costs around $50,000.
For Amanda, the choice is impossible — and yet crystal clear. She refuses to accept that her daughter should have to endure 25 more procedures just to survive when there is a chance, however difficult, for a different future.
Venous malformations are extraordinarily rare — affecting just 0.01% of people worldwide. Even fewer patients ever reach specialists with the experience to truly treat them. Lily is one of the rarest of the rare — and now, she stands at the edge of a possibility her family once believed would never exist.
A childhood not defined by pain.
A face that can grow without fear.
A life where hospitals are no longer the norm.
Lily deserves that chance.
As the holidays approach, her family is holding onto hope — and asking for prayers, kindness, and encouragement as they fight to give their daughter the future every child should have.
Because no five-year-old should measure her life in surgeries.
And because sometimes, hope shows up from across the world — and changes everything.
