A seven-year-old boy who spent two years growing out his hair to donate to cancer patients has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of the disease himself.
Vinny Desautels was happy to grow his blond hair to 13 inches to help someone battling cancer, despite being teased by other children.
“I want to help people, so they don’t have to go to the doctors to fight cancer,” Vinny explained.
When children teased that he looked like a girl, the boy shrugged the criticism off.
“During that time, he was mistaken for a girl many times, but Vinny took it like a champ and was like, ‘Nah, I’m a boy,’” his father Jason, a combat veteran, said.
But in cruel twist of fate, shortly after completing his mission and chopping off his long ponytail, Vinny and his family found out that he had stage 4 cancer.
Vinny reportedly came home from school complaining of knee pain. Before long, doctors discovered he had a growth around his hips.
When they saw a bone growing around his eye and right cheek, they feared that their original assumption that it was just an allergy wasn’t the case. Instead, they worried the two issues might be linked. Doctors also identified a malignant growth on his eye.
Doctors are still trying to figure out what kind of cancer Vinny has after they discovered growths around his hip, in the bone around his eye, and on his right cheek, his father Jason said.