After his all-terrain vehicle crashed near his home in Wasilla, Alaska, in March, Isaac Turnbull had the presence of mind to call his dad. He was okay, he said, except for one thing: He couldn’t feel his legs. Isaac, 16, soon learned that he had fractured his back and injured his spinal cord. In a […]
Dr. Anisa Ibrahim was 6 in 1993 when her family came to Seattle from Somalia, driven from their country by civil war. In the beginning, everything about their new country was exciting and confusing — especially the supermarket. “We were used to going to the market every day to buy fresh food,” recalls Ibrahim, now […]
Amie Lusk couldn’t have known it at the time, but she started on her career path the day she got caught sleeping in the book nook of her fourth grade classroom. For weeks, she had been hiding her fatigue and sneaking naps in the nook. But that day a classmate found her, woke her up […]
When Seattle Children’s Family Advisory Council opened nominations for the 2015 Family Choice Awards, patients and families responded with more than 200 names – each one belonging to a staff or faculty member who made an indelible impression for all the right reasons. With great difficulty, the advisory council whittled down the nominations to select […]
Everything went perfectly when Amanda Erickson’s first baby was born. Bennet arrived right on time on March 11, 2012, healthy and eager to nurse. Exactly two years later – on March 11, 2014 – Bennet’s sister, Juliette, came into the world. This time, says Erickson, “it was an adventure birth.” In other words, nothing went […]
When Kristina Spencer joined the Seattle Children’s Hospital Protection Program team as its senior administrative assistant last summer, she took on another, unofficial role: director of duffels. The duffels in question – dozens of brightly colored, kid-sized bags stashed around the Protection Program’s offices – had been purchased with grant money and were phase one of […]
Last April, at the age of 12, Lydia Vaughan felt hungry for the first time. The new sensation – along with support from her family and a team of specialists at Seattle Children’s – helped her learn to do in two weeks what she had never done before: put food in her mouth and swallow […]
This month, Dr. Kym Ahrens is going to camp with 24 teenagers. Some people would call that an adventure; others, a challenge. Ahrens calls it research. Ahrens, an adolescent medicine specialist and researcher within Seattle Children’s Research Institute’s Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development, is studying whether an intensive, five-day “dose” of a specially designed […]
Katie Davenport and the other nurses on the surgical unit at Seattle Children’s Hospital generally use oral or underarm thermometers to take patients’ temperatures. But in other areas of the hospital, clinicians use temporal thermometers, which take readings with a simple forehead swipe. Parents who have seen the temporal thermometers in action often ask Katie […]
The heart that connects Rachel Cradduck to a family in Mexico was transplanted into her son Ethan Robbins at Seattle Children’s Hospital when he was just five months old. It came from a baby who died in a California hospital after her family traveled there for medical care. “A heart transplant is a bittersweet thing,” […]
