Shantell “Princess” Pooser, at only 17 years old, was born to defy the odds by living her dreams as a teenage flight attendant. Despite being born with down syndrome and a series of tracheal diseases that makes it nearly impossible to breathe, this has never diminished Princess’ astonishing will to fulfil her goals.
“She said, Mommy, I wanna be a flight attendant, and I said, you can be whatever you wanna be girl!” Says Princess’ mother, Deanna Miller-Berry.
“She has a series of terminal airway defects. What’s happening is she’s got a series of growths from her nasal cavity to her larynx and it causes her to suffocate on a day-to-day basis. So when she was first born, we woke up to a blue baby almost every night not knowing what was going on,” Miller-Berry said. The official name of the condition is laryngomalacia, tracheomalacia, and tracheobronchial malacia.
Since 2016, Princess has had to frequently fly back and forth from her home in South Carolina to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital in Ohio for treatment and surgeries. Due to the need to travel by air so much, Princess’ first wish on her bucket list was to be a flight attendant. When a pilot working for American Airlines found out about Princess’ dream job, he made sure to convert her dreams to reality to make her the first flight attendant with special needs, as well as a terminal illness. True enough that on her 17th birthday, Princess got the privilege to deliver the safety instructions to passengers every time she boards a flight to Cincinnati, with a complete official uniform and wings.
Back on the ground, Princess is making sure to accomplish all her other dreams on her bucket list, and 2018 was a year of all her firsts, such as getting a haircut done in a professional salon, and going to an 8th grade social with her best friend. As for the other things she can achieve, well, the sky is the limit!
