To someone driving by, it might look like an average playground -- but to Zamirra Paul, the new playground at her home is a dream come true.
The young girl is in Halifax, N.S.’s IWK Health Centre getting radiation treatment. In February, she was diagnosed with medulloblastoma – an aggressive type of brain cancer.
“It was a big brain tumour, about the size of a golf ball, maybe a little bit bigger,” Zamirra’s father, Nepauset Paul, told CTV Atlantic from the family’s home in New Brunswick’s Tobique First Nation. “It was severe. It grew fast. They said within a year it grew that big, but then as we got more diagnosed… it was like two or three small tumours that came into one.”
As she fights the cancer, Zamirra was asked what her one wish would be if she could have anything. Her answer was a playground and fairy garden. Make-A-Wish Foundation made the wish come true.
“Once we had the drawing from Zamirra – she did do a drawing for us of some requirements – and we were able to at least know what the components need to be, so we brought in professionals to lay it out for us and then we brought in the builders, the project managers, the landscape architects and made it come together,” Joyce Nifort of Make-A-Wish Atlantic Provinces told CTV.
There’s a climbing dome, a swing set, slides, a sand box and Zamirra’s very own play house. Although Zamirra couldn’t be there for the playground’s unveiling this week, she was able to see it all via video chat.
“Just by the look on her face, she’s totally amazed,” her father said. “She’s happy – you can tell. When she gets home, this will be the first place she comes to.”
The Make-A-Wish foundation says that this is one of the more unique wishes they’ve been asked to fulfill. But Zamirra’s father says that it goes to show the kind of person his little girl is.
“It’s the reason she really picked the playground, so she could have this for her brothers and sisters – not just for her. She was very selfless in her wish… it’s amazing.”
With seven more treatments of radiation to go, the hope is this granted wish will give Zamirra the strength to carry on and go into remission once she returns home in several weeks.
“She just loves to play,” her father said. “She loves to have fun. She’s a kid and she hasn’t been able to be a kid in the hospital, you know, for seven months.”
With a report from CTV Atlantic’s Ashley Blackford
