A small but mighty three-year-old who survived brain cancer got the opportunity of a lifetime when he got to drop the first puck at a Boston Bruins game.
Quinn Waters, also known as “the Mighty Quinn,” dropped the first puck during the Boston Bruins game against the San Jose Sharks at TD Garden for Hockey Fights Cancer Night.
But things were not always so easy for Quinn, who underwent surgery to remove a brain tumor, four rounds of chemotherapy, and a stem cell transplant before he was declared cancer-free.
“We were in his worst chemotherapy during the Stanley Cup Playoffs,” Jarlath Waters, Quinn’s father, told NHL.com. “Quinn was probably at his worst, as far as health-wise. And we watched every game in the room. The Bruins got us through some rough nights, just me and him. So this means a lot.”
After Quinn underwent surgery to remove the tumor, Boston Bruins forward Charlie Coyle sent him a message of support through Facebook during the Stanley Cup playoffs after finding out that they were from the same town of Weymouth, the Boston Herald reported.
Coyle even went to visit Quinn as he was cooped up in his house for the summer recovering from surgery and several rounds of chemotherapy.
“It meant a lot to us,” Waters told the Herald Tuesday. “Charlie really lifted Quinn’s spirits And it means a lot that the team reached out to us when Quinn was sick. It helped us through a rough patch. And now we get to celebrate him being better.”
Waters said Quinn’s last MRI showed no new signs of disease and that the hockey game was Quinn’s first public outing in months since his diagnosis of medulloblastoma — a tumor located on his brain stem, Boston 25 News reported.
“This is a little family celebration, actually our first real public outing in, I want to say, nine months,” Waters said. “There’s no words for it. We’ve been holding our breath for so long waiting for some good news and then we finally got it.”
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