Noelle Franklin was your typical girly-girl — full of sass, sparkle and confidence. She loved to dance, and her fake nails were always so long she could barely function with them — not that she cared. Noelle was obsessed with skincare and makeup, always borrowing from the best brands, even ones her mom, Toni, didn’t use. Drunk Elephant? She had it. At just 6 years old, she knew how to work a beauty routine better than most adults.

She grew up in the Raleigh-Clayton area of North Carolina, surrounded by love, especially from her 12-year-old brother, Christian, and her parents, Dylan and Toni. The Franklins were a typical family in every sense: busy days, school pick-ups, family outings and lots of laughter.

But on May 4, 2024, their world was turned upside down.

The night before, Noelle had come inside after playing and pointed to a swollen spot on her leg. It looked like a bug bite — nothing alarming, and it wasn’t causing any pain. Still, just to be safe, her parents scheduled an urgent care visit for the next morning.

“That Saturday started off like any other,” Toni remembers. “We took the kids to the farmer’s market, stopped at McDonald’s for breakfast, and then went to the urgent care appointment. We were sitting in the back of the car, eating by a little pond while we waited.”

The Franklin family.Jessie Peloso Photography
Noelle was taken in for an x-ray. What the doctor saw didn’t look like a bug bite at all — it looked serious.

What followed was a whirlwind: a week packed with appointments, scans and biopsies. The diagnosis came quickly and painfully — osteosarcoma, a rare and aggressive bone cancer. Even worse, further scans revealed the cancer had already spread to both of Noelle’s lungs.

“I don’t think we really knew what to think,” Dylan says. “One minute everything’s normal. That week leading up to this, we went to gymnastics. We were doing everything just as a normal family would be doing. Then overnight or in a blink of an eye, everything changed.”

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“We’re lucky that we live kind of in a more populous area of North Carolina, so some of the better medical facilities are not outrageously far away,” he adds. “So we didn’t have to start small and then work our way up. We just kind of jumped straight to a larger facility.”

At that time, the parents’ minds were filled with questions: Where can we go? Who’s going to give her the best treatment?

“It’s just something you don’t ever expect to happen until it happens,” Dylan says. “And then when it happens, literally your whole world shifts and changes, and you’re just filled with emotions and thoughts and the what-ifs. And I think at the initial point, we just wanted everything to be okay, and how do we get there? And so that was our first focus.”

Noelle Franklin holding up her doll.Toni Franklin
Right away, the Franklin family dove headfirst into treatment. Noelle began MAP chemotherapy — a standard but intense regimen for osteosarcoma. It started with one round of inpatient chemo, where she would stay in the hospital for three to five days at a time. After that, she’d get a three-week break, then begin the next cycle.

The pattern became the family’s new normal: three to five days on, three weeks off — and repeat.

Typically, patients go through about 10 weeks of this pre-surgical chemo. Then comes surgery to remove the primary tumor — in Noelle’s case, the source of the cancer in her leg. After surgery, more chemotherapy follows in hopes of slowing or stopping the disease from progressing.

In total, the treatment plan usually spans about 28 weeks, including both “on” and “off” weeks. But the reality is that beyond that point, the options become painfully limited.

“A lot of the studies and trials just don’t show meaningful benefits,” Toni explains. “You’re kind of fishing in a barrel, just throwing things at the wall hoping something sticks. If there were a proven treatment that worked, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. We’d have a cure.”

“I think Noelle proved, although we had worries every step of the way that we had to deal with, that she just wasn’t your typical cancer and chemo patient,” the mom adds. “I mean, besides not having hair, if you saw her out at the grocery store, you wouldn’t have even known that she was going through cancer.”

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Noelle Franklin posing for the camera.Toni Franklin
Although every part of Noelle’s cancer journey was difficult, one moment in particular stood out as the hardest: when she had to have her leg amputated. Since her primary tumor was in her leg, on Oct. 25, 2024, she underwent a hip disarticulation, where doctors removed her entire leg at the hip.

For her parents, it was admirable — and astonishing — to see how she continued to function, despite the pain and recovery.

“We thought we’d have a month or two where she wouldn’t want to do anything,” Dylan says. “I think we had a week, and that’s just because she was in recovery. But as soon as we got home, she was raring to go. She wasn’t the type to settle. We tried to get her in a wheelchair, and she hated it. So she said, ‘Nope, I’m going to do my walker.’ And she just took off from there.”

“If they told her to do 10 reps of something, she would do 20,” Toni adds. “She’d surpass it. And everyone knew that about Noelle at the hospital. I just feel like her strength… A lot of people come up to Dylan and me now,9 and they’re like, ‘She got it from y’all.’ And I know we’re part of her cancer journey too, but just seeing how Noelle was — I hate to take credit for that because she was just so strong throughout the whole thing.”