The next week, he was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. “It really came out of nowhere,” says his mother, Roni. “He seemed totally fine and then, all of the sudden, he wasn’t.”

Early on his treatment, Dylan learned that he qualified for a wish. “My eyes widened, and I perked up in my seat,” he says. “Hearing that after getting the worst news possible, I just felt so hopeful and so excited.”

Dylan is a Disney superfan and is fascinated with theme park design. He is especially interested in the Disney Imagineers, the talented creative minds behind the parks. He dreams of one day becoming an Imagineer himself. So, he determined his wish would be to go to Disney World and experience some behind-the-scenes magic.

Thinking about his wish helped Dylan immensely as he was going through treatment. “It was just a really big motivation for me,” he explains.

Nevertheless, treatment was incredibly hard on Dylan. Eight months into it, he relapsed and had to start chemo all over again to try to get back in remission. “He was considered even more high risk,” says Roni. “It was just really scary.”

The relapse also meant that Dylan had to wait longer for his wish because he wasn’t well enough to travel.

He received a bone marrow transplant the summer before what would have been his senior year. Dylan says this was the hardest part of his treatment, physically and emotionally.

“Physically, it was the weakest I’d ever been. All my hair was gone and I had a feeding tube for the first time,” he says. “I was on so many pain meds that I was just zonked out the entire time, but I was also still in lots of pain.”

Emotionally, the burden was even bigger. Doctors anticipated that Dylan would require three to six months of isolation following the surgery. Instead, he ended up in isolation for a full year, missing all of his senior year. “It was a really tough year,” says Dylan.

It was hard for him to watch his friends and siblings go about their lives without him, particularly his twin brother. “I’m on social media, and that honestly didn’t help,” Dylan says. “Seeing everything that my friends were doing really made it hard for me because I was just stuck inside.”

“He missed out on a lot,” says Roni, “and that was hard, especially when he had a twin brother that was getting to do everything that he couldn’t do.”

As parents, Roni and Dylan’s dad, Richard, were torn. They hated to see Dylan suffer emotionally, but they also knew that he needed to stay isolated for his own protection. His immune system was incredibly compromised, and they couldn’t risk exposing him to the outside world.

“It was hard because we kind of felt like he was trapped, like he was being held prisoner,” Roni explains, “but I think that we wouldn’t be where we are today if we had not taken it so seriously.”