Closing Thoughts from your Creative Director:

I watched the current Children’s Hospital campus be built from a bed in the ICU.

In the late summer of 1999, I developed an infection that threatened my life. Severe pancreatitis wrecked my body for months. I was unable to eat or drink while my body healed. Restless sleep, an empty stomach as well as the pain, uncertainty and knowledge that I may die was almost too much for a thirteen- year-old. My organs failed. I fell in and out of consciousness. My parents prepared themselves for the worst. And more than once, it seemed as though the worst was just hours away.

But I fought. And I wasn’t alone.

That’s the thing I learned at Children’s Hospital. When you’re in a place that cares, when you’re in a place that understands, when you’re surrounded by people who want nothing more than to see you walk out those doors and never return, you learn about compassion and caring. You learn about hope and joy. You learn about childhood, and how important that sense of wonder is.

You learn that our most childlike traits, our ability to believe, to cling, to fight, to imagine a world, a better world, filled with miracles and the people who make them, is something that disease and sickness cannot touch.

There were doctors at my bedside hourly, nurses even more often than that. And though the years have gone by and I haven’t been able to remember all their names, I know their faces and carry them with me, and the feeling of them squeezing my hand, encouraging me, telling me to keep up the good fight, those memories are with me every day.

Children’s Hospital taught me about sickness, but it also taught me about not giving up. And because of those lessons, I am still here.

Because of it, I am a mother of a daughter with a heart condition, diagnosed and treated at Children’s Hospital, as alive and active and wonderful as you can imagine. Because of those lessons, I am the aunt of a wonderful young man with a heart condition, the champion of two open heart surgeries at Children’s Hospital, smarter and funnier and more resourceful than most adults I know. Because of Children’s Hospital, I have a family, as caring and compassionate and fun and comforting as any I’ve ever seen.

Because of Children’s Hospital, I am a Creative Director, filled with ideas and surrounded by a wonderful team, ready to tell my story, my daughter’s story, my nephew’s story, my family’s story, and the thousands and thousands of other stories like ours.

I’m here because of Children’s Hospital, and I hope, one day, to know you all, and to give as much as I can to the place that gave me so much.

Sincerely,