CMN to broadcast from HSC June 3
On
Saturday, June 3, from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., the Children’s Miracle Network
(CMN) will air its annual broadcast from the MUSC Harper Student Center
to raise funds for the Department of Pediatrics at the MUSC Children’s
Hospital. This is the Children’s Hospital’s 23rd CMN broadcast. The
event will air on WCSC TV-Channel 5 and include on-air celebrities Bill
Sharpe and Debi Chard.All of the proceeds generated from the broadcast will allow MUSC to provide the best health care possible. With world-renowned pediatric physicians and research in the prevention and treatment of childhood diseases, MUSC is one of the most respected pediatric health care centers in the nation, earning top rankings from U.S. News & World Report, American Health Magazine, Child Magazine and The Best Doctors in America. During the past 23 years, the broadcast has raised almost $8 million. CMN is an international, non-profit organization dedicated to raising funds and awareness for 170 children’s hospitals in the U.S. and Canada.
The number to call to make a pledge during the broadcast is 792-8000. For information, call the Children’s Hospital Fund special event line at 792-1112.
During the broadcast, visitors are welcome. Viewers will meet some of MUSC’s miracle patients who beat the odds against illnesses such as cancer, cystic fibrosis, sickle cell, heart and lung diseases, birth defects, and severe trauma from accidents. One of MUSC’s miracle patients is Mia Turner, and her story, below, was printed March 30 in The Post and Courier and is reprinted with permission.
For the love of Mia
by Brenda RindgeOf The Post and Courier Staff
Mothers of 2-year-olds typically are concerned with potty training, sharing toys and teaching them to say something other than “No!”
Angel and Mickey
Turner help Mia, 2, with her dinner.Angel Turner has different goals. Her toddler recently finished her fifth and final round of chemotherapy in her battle against leukemia.
There are other priorities in daughter Mia’s life, such as keeping clear her “lines,” the tubes that connect her little body to the bags of fluids hanging on an ever-present metal pole, and keeping a close watch on things such as her white blood cell count.
“We had just started taking the bottle away and were in the process of potty training her,” Angel says of her daughter, who turned 2 on Dec. 30.
For nearly all of the past six months, Mia’s world has been confined to the seventh-floor cancer ward of the Children’s Hospital at Medical University of South Carolina.
She loves “Doodlebops,” a Disney Channel show she watches on the wall-mounted TV in her room, and being pulled through the halls in a wagon by her grandparents. She eats her meals while sitting on her bed, the same bed she shares with her mother or grandmother each night.
On good days, she plays in the atrium, the sunny playroom on her floor that is filled with toys, books, crafts and more to help sick kids forget about their problems for a while.
Mia’s what you would call a girly-girl. She wears a little gold band on the perfectly manicured ring finger of her right hand. Her toenails are covered with polish as pink as bubble gum. Tiny gemstones dot her earlobes. Her wardrobe is filled with clothes that are pink and frilly.
Despite her current situation, her disposition is sunny and she’s quick with a smile. She’s advanced verbally and eager to tell on her GaGa, Angel’s mother, Geri Watford, who accidentally knocked a construction paper drawing off Mia’s door.
Her sense of humor also is beyond her years.
GaGa asks, “Who’s girl are you?” and Mia smiles knowingly while answering every name she knows but the one GaGa wants to hear.
Really, though, Mia’s too young to understand that this isn’t a normal life for a 2-year-old.
“There are some advantages with her age,” Angel says. “For instance, her favorite food is pizza. She can eat it, throw up, and then eat more. An adult would never want to look at pizza again.”
As far as Mia knows, all little girls live in hospital rooms and spend their days being poked and prodded by grown-ups. They all lose their hair, vomit often and have their dirty diapers weighed.
“I think sometimes she wonders why her sister’s not here and she is,” Angel says of her older daughter.
In fact, when 10-month-old Mailey comes to visit, the sisters are clearly happy to see each other, sharing endless hugs and kisses. Mia cries crocodile tears when she thinks Mailey is going home. Mia hasn’t been home since the beginning of January.
In truth, she hasn’t been to this home at all, as her family moved to a house in a North Charleston subdivision during Mia’s most recent hospital stay, which started Jan. 11. She hasn’t even seen the swing set waiting in her backyard.
“She can’t be around animals or cigarette smoke,” Angel says. “Things like that scared us because you can’t control them in an apartment complex, so we moved into a house.”
‘A blessing and a curse’
Until all this started last summer, Angel, 35, and Mickey, 31, thought they were living the American dream. During their eight-year marriage, they had become the parents to two girls, born just 16 1/2 months apart.
They lived in Myrtle Beach, where Angel grew up and her parents still lived. Mickey worked at a local car dealership, and Angel, who was a nurse to adult cancer patients, quit her job to be a stay-at- home mom. They had started shopping around for a church with a strong children’s program.
Perhaps it was Angel’s medical training or maybe it was a mother’s intuition. Whatever you want to call it, she knew there was something wrong with her toddler last September.
“In July, Mia fell at my mother’s house and hurt her arm,” says Angel. “The orthopedist said it was fractured at the wrist and put a cast on it, but it continued to get worse.”
Then Mia’s skin became sallow and she started running a low temperature that wouldn’t go away.
“I took her to the doctor every other day for two weeks,” Angel says. “I begged for a blood count. I knew something was going on.”
Even Mickey teased that she was being overly cautious, she says.
Finally, on Friday, Sept. 23, Mia saw a physician who was filling in for her regular doctor.
When Angel told him Mia’s history, “He immediately said, ‘Let’s do a blood count,’ “ she says.
Hours later, at Grand Strand Regional Medical Center, the test confirmed Angel’s fears: Mia’s hemoglobin count was low and her little body was not making new blood cells.
Mia Turner“It’s been a blessing and a curse to have a medical background,” Angel says. “When the doctor told me the blood counts, I knew right away it was bad.”
Mia needed more tests and care that wasn’t available where she was, so she and her mother were loaded into an emergency vehicle and sent to Charleston.
It was close to midnight when they arrived at the Children’s Hospital. In the middle of the night, more of Mia’s blood was drawn, but the medical staff warned that the results wouldn’t be available until the weekend was over.
“Leukemia was one thing they were thinking about, but it also could have been a viral infection,” Angel says.
The doctor didn’t want to wait for the results. Over the weekend, he examined the toddler’s blood sample under the microscope himself.
On Monday, a bone marrow test verified that Mia had leukemia.
Within two days, she started her first round of chemotherapy.
The same day, the Turners decided to sell their house and move to Charleston.
“I kept thinking, ‘What if it happens again?’ “ Angel says. “That was the longest ride of my life in that ambulance. We just came to the conclusion that we would rather be here.”
That weekend, they drove back to Myrtle Beach, put their house on the market and called on their friends for assistance.
“We threw everything we owned into black trash bags and left,” she says.
A new routine
Geri and Michael Watford, who had moved to a new house in Myrtle Beach just weeks before, dropped everything to come to Charleston to help their only child and her family through the crisis. None of them knew anyone in Charleston except the people they had met at the hospital. Home became a small apartment not far from there.
“It was just somewhere to camp,” Angel says. “We have lived out of suitcases, boxes and bags since then. I’d live in a one-man tent as long as she’s OK.”
Mickey found a job as sales manager at Victory Hyundai, while Angel and her parents fell into a routine of swapping off caring for Mia in the hospital and Mailey at the apartment.
At Halloween, Mia trick-or-treated through the hospital hallways in her Cinderella dress and “glass” slippers.
For Christmas, her family—even Mailey—spent the night in her hospital room. Among the presents Santa left Mia was a shiny princess bicycle she is too small to pedal.
On her second birthday, friends and family gathered to celebrate in a borrowed doctor’s office down the hall.
Angel and her mother have worked around the medical equipment to try to make the small room as homey as possible. Get-well wishes from other children and Mia’s own artwork decorate the walls, and a small cache of toys is stacked in a corner.
Every night, either Mommy or GaGa sleeps in the bed next to Mia. Dad Mickey works long hours, but often tries to visit late at night or early in the morning.
“She’s never alone here,” Angel says.
Being there
Tending to a sick child can wreak havoc on a mother’s confidence. Angel often found herself caught between one child and the other.
When Mia started treatment, Angel was told she would either have to stay away from her or quit breast-feeding Mailey, then just 4 months old, because the radiation could seep into her breast milk.
“They wouldn’t let me hold Mia or wipe away her tears,” she says.
Her parents’ support has helped her through times when she feels torn.
“I don’t want to miss anything with Mia or with Mailey,” Angel says. “I’m glad to have someone here or there when I can’t be.”
The whole experience has shown Angel cancer from a different side.
Knowing her medical background, the staff often goes into the hallway and shuts the door to discuss Mia’s situation.
“They try not to talk in front of me too much because then I start asking questions,” she says. She had to learn to let the nurses take care of things she was used to doing herself.
Now she has taken the role of a parent of a cancer patient.
“There was a woman who took us under her wing,” she says, apologizing as she wipes away tears. “Her son has brain cancer and is 13 years old. When I met him, the first thing he said was, ‘I’m sorry about your daughter,’ and here he is fighting his own battle. All the kids in here are worried about each other and not themselves.”
In February, Mia had an infection and ended up in an induced coma and on a ventilator in intensive care for a week. Another mother introduced her to a friend whose child went through the same thing several years earlier and is now healthy.
“Now I try to take new people under my wing,” she says. “I remember how I felt with Mia. Going through something like this makes you want to reach out and help.”
‘For the Love of Mia’
Churches have provided prayers, meals and even haircuts. Complete strangers send cash in the mail.
“It really teaches you about the kind of person you need to be,” she says. “We have been amazed at the people who have jumped in to help.”
“For the Love of Mia,” an upbeat song written and recorded by Jonathan Robinson, has given the family with a theme for their campaign. They’ve never met him, but they’ve been told he was so moved by Mia’s story that he wrote the song.
“This whole thing that we’re doing is for the love of Mia,” Geri Watford says.
After Mia’s second round of chemotherapy, Angel, Mickey and Mailey were tested to see if their marrow matched Mia’s. If it did, she could have had a transplant at that point, which would have put the disease into remission. None of them matched.
Instead, Mia had three more rounds of chemotherapy, which ended the first week of March.
Her family now is biding time until Mia’s body is strong enough for a bone marrow biopsy that will show whether she is in remission or if she will need a bone marrow transplant. There’s a 40 percent chance the cancer is gone.
While the family waits, people they’ve just met have organized fundraisers to pay for bone marrow tests, which cost $70 a pop. On March 19, nearly 100 bikers participated in a Poker Run. A live and silent auction April 13 at Cottage on the Creek, which was donated for the night by Wild Wing, will raise even more money.
Regardless of Mia’s situation, the Turners are planning a bone marrow drive April 22. Often, potential matches in the existing databank don’t pan out.
“They have been checked for a certain person or have become sick themselves or changed their minds about donating,” Angel says. “The bigger picture here is not just our situation. This is for all the children in here who don’t have donors.”
Editor’s note: Julio Barredo, M.D., confirmed May 26 that Mia is in remission.
Friday, June 2, 2006
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