“Oh! What?!” Troy smiles imitating her reaction. “Unbelievable!”

Before welcoming a real dog, Lexi’s big loves were little stuffed animals, specifically one owl.

“I’m six years older than you,” Lexi says in a video showing her cradling the owl. “You’re still a baby.”

“I don’t know if she ever saw a real owl in her life,” Troy says. “But she surrounded herself with owls.”

She had owl pictures and an owl bedspread in her bedroom, hung her owl shaped handprint art in the living room, Lexi always brought her owl to the hospital.

“They put in the needle,” Lexi says to her owl in another video. “And take out the bad stuff.”

Lexi was diagnosed with the ultra-rare Blau syndrome, which filled her body with debilitating and painful inflammation. Max was bought to be Lexi’s therapy dog and ende