Medicine Meets Faith
I recently had the fortune of meeting an amazing family through my work with medically fragile and technology dependent babies and children. These children require gastrostomy tubes, ventilators or tracheostomy tubes to survive. When I met Sarah*, her 9-year-old baby girl Lucy* was not walking or talking and required a ventilator to breathe. She was in a vegetative state and unresponsive to painful stimuli. My job was to organize and provide nursing care for Lucy in her home. Sarah is a single mom who put herself through LPN school while raising her beautiful girls. They are her entire world. Everything she does is to help them become loving and caring women that will hopefully become mothers themselves one day. Lucy was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer at the age of 8 in November. The tumor was inoperable and chemotherapy or radiation would not have any effect on it. She was given steroids to decrease the swelling surrounding her brain so that she coul