This is pretty damn cool, per the Toronto Star's Lauren Pelley:

Singing in front of almost 20,000 people is no easy feat. For Carley Allison, the Canadian anthem singer at Saturday’s Leafs game, the challenge was even greater. The 19-year-old is battling double lung cancer, taking daily chemotherapy pills, and coping with changes in her voice after having a tumour — and part of her trachea — removed last year.

It’s no surprise her careful yet beautiful rendition of “O Canada” before the Leafs and Blackhawks game was met with thunderous applause throughout the Air Canada Centre.

“If I told myself a couple years ago that I was going to be singing at the ACC the national anthem, I’d be freaking out,” the petite Toronto singer said in her hotel room a few hours before the game.

Allison, who is also a figure skater and Leafs fan, was first diagnosed with an extremely rare type of cancer in February 2013: a clear-cell sarcoma in the trachea. Since then, videos of her singing after an emergency tracheotomy have been viewed tens of thousands of times. Allison later had the tumour in her trachea removed and was cancer free for almost a year, until learning this fall that the cancer had returned in her lungs. She is now taking some time off from her studies as a second-year student at Queen’s University to focus on her treatment.

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