♪ To a melody played ♪
♪ On the strings of our souls ♪
It's a mother-son dance
that may not happen in the future.
Samantha Duran says she wanted to make sure
she had this memory with her son, Maddox.
It was just something that,
it just escalated into something I never imagined.
I just was doing it just to have
one special moment like this with my baby boy
to keep forever.
Maddox was diagnosed with spina bifida
while Samantha was still pregnant.
He's only two but has has 16 surgeries in his lifetime.
Last year, doctors found a cyst on his spine
that made the family realize
his time with them may be short.
He's been having these choking episodes
which are typically neurological related for him.
They predicted that it could
herniate or compress his brain stem and be
a life ending event
and naturally, we were beside ourselves
and we started making all the memories that we could.
Fearing she wouldn't get the chance
to dance with her son on his wedding day,
Samantha and Maddox got dressed up
and shared a dance to a song from the movie Coco.
At the beginning, I was just giving him
some kisses on his head and
it sounds weird but I was smelling him.
I was just soaking in everything that that moment was.
But then, about half way through,
I turned my head to the right and
that's when you can see I am trying so hard at that point
not to lose it because that's when it hit me
exactly what we were doing.
She's reminding parents everywhere
to enjoy whatever time they are given with their children
and why moments like this one are so precious.
While people might not have
the same exact diagnosis as him,
they have complications or obstacles themselves
and it's encouraging them to go out
and make the memories or do something like this
and I think that that's fantastic.
For insideedition.com,
I'm Mara Montalbano.