A family in Florida is thanking a kind stranger for helping to save their toddler. The little girl, Millie Longhenry, has a rare brain disorder that requires many expensive treatments. Although the family has been doing everything they can financially, it has become increasingly more difficult.
Now, the family can continue with the treatments that allow their daughter to thrive. That’s thanks to an anonymous donor, who knows that they’ve likely saved a little girl’s life.
Millie was born with an extremely rare brain disorder.
Millie was born in August 2023. At the time, her parents, Bill and Meg Longhenry, were told she had a severe congenital brain disorder called alobar holoprosencephaly and would likely not survive. HPE is extremely rare; most babies don’t survive more than a week after birth. And Millie was born with the most severe form of the disease.
“We found out that she has a rare brain malformation where part of her brain didn’t develop, and the other part didn’t develop correctly,” Meg Longhenry said in an interview with Fox News Digital. “So there’s no division between the two hemispheres and the middle is hollow.”
“They told us over 95% of patients with this diagnosis don’t survive past the first few months and anyone who survives past that requires an enormous deal of medical care, like feeding tubes and breathing tubes,” Bill Longhenry added. “Usually they have no brain function.”
A doctor took a chance on caring for the girl.
After two months in the hospital, Millie was sent home with hospice care. She was given four to six months to live, but her parents weren’t ready to give up on her.
A friend suggested the Longhenrys reach out to Dr. Brandon Crawford, a functional neurologist at the NeuroSolution Center of Austin. His specialty is noninvasive treatments that don’t use drugs.
Crawford’s treatments include laser light therapies, acoustic wave therapy that uses sound waves to stimulate natural healing processes, and primitive reflex integration. These treatments “retrain” baby’s body-brain connection, helping them to better control their movements, Fox News Digital noted.
Thanks to these treatments, Millie is defying the odds and thriving. “She’s got a spunky little personality, and it’s amazing,” Bill Longhenry told the news outlet. “Honestly, if you look at her and interact with her in person and then look at her MRI, you wouldn’t think it’s the same kid.”
The family ran into financial hardship paying for treatments.
Last month, however, the family was forced to cancel a treatment because they didn’t have the money to pay for it. Their insurance doesn’t cover all of the treatments. Crawford told them to come in anyway. On March 27, 2025, shortly before Crawford began a procedure on Millie, he received a call that changed everything.
“It was another patient who has been following Millie’s story, and she said, ‘I feel like I’m supposed to donate something for Millie’s case, and my front desk said, well, that would be amazing,” he told the news outlet. The stranger paid off Millie’s entire bill, which was more than $47,000.
This one act of kindness has changed so much for the family.
“It’s just impossible to understand that level of generosity from a stranger,” Bill Longhenry said. Eventually, the Longhenrys did find out who the donor was – one of Dr. Crawford’s former patients – and thanked her. Even though the donation is an immense help, their financial woes are far from over.
“I think the finances are always really scary for us, but there’s not a price that I could put on her life,” Meg Longhenry told Fox News Digital. “I’ll continue to fight and do what I need to do so she can have the best life that she can.”
