WITHOUT A PAUSE
New SickKids video series shows children’s lives transformed.
Every year, The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) shares stories of real patients: kids whose lives are placed on hold while they’re treated for serious medical issues. And it’s not just the child whose life is affected — the entire family’s life comes to a temporary halt as everything but the child’s health care is put on pause.
As the Director of the Transplant and Regenerative Medicine Centre, Dr. Rulan Parekh has seen many such cases first-hand. She has watched parents take on the burden of caring for a sick child, often separated from the support of extended family and friends who may live far away. “The simplest things in life that people take care of become more complicated when you have a child who’s got end stage organ failure,” Parekh says.
This year, SickKids is sharing the stories of six children who received care at the hospital a year ago and whose lives were transformed — “unpaused” — by their treatments. Four of these patients are profiled below: Charlie, who was placed in the SickKids Fetal Cardiac Program while she and her twin sister were still in utero; Liam, who has had multiple open-heart surgeries; Kael, whose rare auto-immune disorder kept him at SickKids for over a year; and Taylum, who received a kidney transplant after having both kidneys removed and was on hemodialysis within months of his birth.
The stories of their recovery are extraordinary, as are the videos that show just how well they’re doing merely a year later. Parekh says parents are surprised at how different their children’s lives are only a few months after a transplant. “The parents go, ‘Wow! Look how much energy they have! Look at everything they can do!’”
The hospital’s current fundraising campaign is built around the notion of “unpausing” patients’ lives. SickKids’ Life on Pause campaign offers donors an opportunity to mirror the team effort that drives the staff at SickKids.
“From physicians, surgeons and nurses to physical therapists, occupational therapists and social workers, SickKids has a team that’s incredibly motivated to help families do well,” says Parekh. “The great thing at SickKids is that we get to offer this multi-disciplinary team that really is of great benefit to the child and family.”
The campaign lets visitors to sickkidsfoundation.com/ unpause watch videos of Charlie, Liam, Kael, Taylum and the others before their operations. To “unpause” their stories and see how well they’re doing today, readers can contribute online with donations. Their video stories will be fully revealed once a certain number of donors have contributed. For Taylum, for instance, SickKids is looking for 602 donors, representing the number of dialysis treatments he needed before having his kidney transplant. Visitors can see how many others have already donated and how close each story is to unpausing.
“To see kids transplanted,” Parekh says, “it’s really the gift of life.”
Help unpause the lives of SickKids patients. Donate today at sickkidsfoundation.com/unpause.
“The simplest things in life that people take care of become more complicated when you have a child who’s got end stage organ failure”
- Dr. Rulan Parekh