The Courier-Journal reported that this weekend, two airlines refused to fly a 5-year-old girl and her mother, invoking the reason that her condition was too instable to be on board. The little Kentucky girl suffers from a fatal rare disease and needed to receive stem cell treatments at a hospital in Beijing.

Hailey Goranflo and her mom, Miranda, had to board on a plane from Canada to China, in order to attend the operation. However, the two airlines, Air China and Air Canada decided during a layover that Hailey was “too sick” to face an air flight.

After receiving treatments in order to calm her convulsions at a Vancouver hospital, the little girl and her mother were constrained to return home, to Shepherdsville, Kentucky.

Miranda Goranflo expressed her shock when she heard the news and told the Courier-Journal from Vancouver that she disagreed with the fact that her daughter was unable to fly. She could not believe the fact that she had come to this point and was now forced to take it all over again. Hailey’s parents raised approximately $78,000 in order to operate their daughter in China, since the procedure is not available in the U.S.

Both Hailey and her 3-year-old brother suffer from a terminal malady named Late Infantile Batten Disease. This illness causes serious damages such as seizures and convulsions, dementia and sightlessness. Most of the patients who have this disease do not pull it through over the age of 12.

According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the syndrome occurs only in an estimated 2 to 4 of every 100,000 live births in the United States.