Addy Jones was three years old when she found herself in a helicopter headed to St. Louis Children's Hospital — alone.

"My parents weren't there," she says. "I was just surrounded by these people that I had no idea who they were, and I had no idea what was going on."

What was going on was leukemia. Diagnosed June 25, 2017.

It had started subtly — low-grade fevers that came and went, no other symptoms, nothing that initially alarmed anyone. But Addy's mom, a nurse, kept pushing. Something wasn't adding up. When the fevers returned, and Addy started looking pale, her mom called it: they were going. A PA at the local clinic took one look and sent them to Carbondale. Blood work there pointed toward a diagnosis. Then came the flight to St. Louis — without her parents, who threw clothes into a bag, not knowing if it would be days or a week, and drove as fast as they could. The diagnosis was waiting when they walked in.

Her dad, Eric, remembers what happened in the weeks that followed with the particularity of someone who lived every hour of it. Addy would put on a princess dress and high heels and parade around the nursing station for the nurses. Then a medication caused severe muscle weakness. In a matter of days, she went from princess parades to crawling.

"She had to do a lot of PT for that," Eric says.

She also lost her hair — gone within 24 to 48 hours after a single dose. She had a port surgically implanted in her chest, which she called her "button," for delivering chemotherapy and drawing blood. Approximately 18 or 19 times, she went under anesthesia for procedures including spinal chemotherapy. She had a significant seizure. And there was a friend she'd made — a girl with a different kind of cancer — who didn't survive.

"That was really hard," Addy says. Then, with the steadiness of someone who has thought about it: "Her parents now have another baby. I don't think that baby has the cancer."

She finished her last medications in September 2019. Her port was removed on November 26th — on her dad's birthday.

"Best birthday present ever," he says.

What followed was something like a re-entry. For two and a half years, the Jones family had been living the way the rest of the world would briefly live during COVID — wiping everything down, not eating out, avoiding exposure. When Addy was finally cleared, ordinary life was full of firsts. First restaurant where they sat out in the open and didn't wipe the table with bleach. First Ferris wheel ride. First trip to a mall. First escalator.

"A lot of firsts," Eric says. "Really late. But—"

He stops himself. Smiles.

Asked how he raised such a remarkable kid, he doesn't reach for a speech.

"I just got lucky," he says.

Addy is a sixth grader now — engaged, curious, fully present in a life that took a long time to reach this kind of ordinary. She likes the challenge of sixth grade. She plays flute in the school band and is learning piano outside of school. She loves to read, and when she writes, she writes fiction, fantasy and poetry.

"I like designing and fine arts and stuff like that," she says. "More the creative things."

It's a direction that surprised no one who knows her. Her father teaches respiratory therapy at Kaskaskia College in Centralia. Her mother is a nurse. And Addy, surrounded by science and medicine from birth, reached toward something else entirely — toward beauty, imagination, story.

She still goes back to St. Louis once a year for a blood draw. There are echocardiograms periodically, cognitive check-ins, and milestones the family watches for. The past isn't entirely past.

But when Addy tries to describe how it all feels now — the helicopter, the hospital, the parades, and the crawling and everything between — she reaches for something unexpected.

"It feels like a dream," she says. "Like you're present in it, and then when it becomes past, it's like it never happened."

She was the fourth child, the one her parents tried for over eight or nine years. The one who almost didn't happen, and then did.

She's here. She's well. She's got stories to write.