Nick: Keep the faith, whatever it is that you do.

Shana: Not everybody’s religious, but we just do a lot of praying. That’s what you can do, just keep the faith and believe.

 – Nick and Shana, parents of Jade, age 6, Dextrocardia

 

I just prayed—we’re not overly religious people—but I found myself in church praying a lot. I did talk to somebody, one of the psychiatrists at Children’s, between the first two surgeries. To this day, we can be walking back through those hospital doors for a simple procedure, and it hits you all back like a ton of bricks. It doesn’t go away. I think that the friendships that have been created with other heart moms, other moms that are going through similar situations with their cardiac kids, has been an awful lot of help.

 – Grace, mother of Austin, age 10, TOF

 

I have not done service there, but I will say this, one of our pastors was able to see Alexandra in the ICU because they allow pastors to come in, but they don’t let other people come. That was really nice when right at the very beginning they came and visited and he sat with my husband and kind of just prayed for her before she had her surgery. I thought that was a really nice thing that Children’s would let happen. So from the very beginning, we prayed with one of our pastors and that’s when we found Alexandra’s doctor—they happened at the same time, which I thought was amazing. For us, our church has come alongside, and prayed with us, and taken our kids, and they’ve done meals for us, especially when we were in the hospital for this pneumonia.

I think medicine’s very important, but just realizing there’s also something bigger, and somebody’s taking care of Alexandra, that’s been really helpful for us. I love this story in the Old Testament, they used to put these things called “Stones of remembrance,” and so at the parting of the Red Sea, when they went through the Red Sea, and how God provided, they put stones of remembrance, and so every time we go in and Alexandra has x-rays, you see all these scars on her body, and I think of those as her stones of remembrance, of how God has preserved her life. It’s interesting because God always says that you need a new heart, and Alexandra has a new heart. So I think there’s all these great tangible things about our faith that come through with the story, and that we’ve been able to tell our children.

 – Kate, mother of Alexandra, age 8, Heart Block & Pacemaker