More Than A Toy, What Happy Wheels Gave Our Family

My son Will was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia on October 10th, 2023. He was seventeen. We had been planning a weekend of college tours, and instead we were faced with a mountain we didn't know we could climb.

The next two and a half years included chemotherapy, lung infections, sepsis, ICU stays, a relapse, and a bone marrow transplant. Now, a year after his transplant, he is twenty, cancer-free, and planning his future.

I am writing with deep gratitude for what happened every Thursday during Will's hospital stay at Shawn Jenkins Children's Hospital in Charleston, SC.

Every Thursday, Happy Wheels came.

You could feel it before the cart appeared. The sound of wheels in the hallway. Then voices, children's voices, with something you almost couldn't believe you were hearing.

Laughter.

I want to describe what laughter sounds like on a pediatric cancer floor, because it's hard to understand unless you've heard it. It feels out of place at first, where monitor and machine beeps are the main sounds. But on Thursdays, there was laughter — from children who have been poked, prodded, and scared, whose normal lives were replaced with something no child should face. Yet because of a cart, a toy, and someone who cared enough to show up, they are laughing. You will never forget it.

Over two and a half years, Will spent 263 nights at Shawn Jenkins — about 38 Thursdays. Happy Wheels came 38 times. In a world of cancer, that consistency was a form of love.

Will spent those years as a teenager in a pediatric hospital, a hardship few people talk about. Think about being seventeen, eighteen, or nineteen. Those years are about independence — car keys, leaving when you need space, figuring out who you are. Will had none of that. He couldn't leave or find a space of his own, not because of anything he did, but because cancer took over his life. He felt that loss every day.

But every Thursday, Happy Wheels gave him something back that cancer had stolen.

When the Happy Wheels cart came to Will's room, he rarely took a toy. Instead he looked at the volunteers and said:

Give my toy to a child to make them smile.

This wasn't about pride or Happy Wheels not having enough for everyone. It was about Will being able to make a choice and do something for the younger children — the babies and toddlers who didn't understand what was happening. He hurt for them. He couldn't fix their diagnoses. He couldn't take the cancer away. But every Thursday, he could choose to give his toy to a child who would feel better because of it.

That one small, intentional act gave Will something no medicine could — agency, purpose, and the chance to help someone else when so much had been taken from him. To be able to give helped him feel better.

Here is also a part of Happy Wheels that nobody talks about—the volunteers.

When you live in a hospital for months, the outside world starts to feel far away. Every Thursday, volunteers came with the cart — people who chose to bring joy to children who needed it. They brought warmth that said, I see you. Not just the child in bed, but the mother in the corner, the father who hasn't slept, the sibling who doesn't understand, the family holding itself together with everything it has.

Those volunteers became part of my community.

I want to tell you about the first day I met Happy Wheels. It was our first Thursday, right after Will's diagnosis. I was somewhere between shock and survival mode when a woman walked in. She was a Happy Wheels volunteer, and she lived in my neighborhood. Her name is Dyan.

We did not know each other well. But she was there in that room, with me during my darkest moment, because she had made the decision long before that day to show up at Shawn Jenkins with a cart full of joy. She looked at me and said, I am here. And I will do everything I can to help you.

That was my first experience of true community, a friend showing up without being asked, right there beside me. She is still there. Still volunteering and still showing up for families now much like where I was then.

That is Happy Wheels.

Will is twenty now. His one-year bone marrow transplant biopsy came back clean. No leukemia. One hundred percent donor marrow. When he heard the news, he said, I am now looking forward, Mom.

He's getting ready to return to the University of South Carolina this fall, making plans with his twin brother Jack, living the ordinary, beautiful life he spent two and a half years fighting for.

Even in my happiness, I think about the children still on that floor — teenagers old enough to understand exactly what cancer has taken. I hope they find, in some small Thursday moment, what Will found: agency, purpose, and the feeling of still being themselves in a situation that tried to define them by their diagnosis.

Donations entirely fund Happy Wheels. Every toy a child gets to choose exists because someone decided these children mattered. People like you. Please share this story. Please give if you can.

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