PAYING IT FOWARD, with a hospital kindness for mothers
Ali Passow spent last Mother’s Day in the children’s ward with her son; what someone did touched her deeply
Ali (Alison) Passow has been there. She knows what it’s like. She was there last Mother’s Day. In the hospital, with her boy, Rhett, who has a rare genetic disorder.
“It’s not how you want to spend Mother’s Day,” says Ali.
It’s not how you want to spend any day but particularly not one meant to celebrate that inexpressibly powerful bond of life-giving attachment. Yet she remembers Mother’s Day 2021 for something other than the beeping of monitors, unsettled sleep and not being at home.
She had already been in the ward for several days with Rhett but that one was different.
“It was the first thing in the morning and a nurse brought it in. Someone had left for her a Mother’s Day cookie, some body lotion and I think a face mask,” says Ali, a nurse, who lives in Lynden.
“I started sobbing,” she says. “I felt like I was being thought of, by more than my family and kids. I felt like I was being recognized, recognized as a mother.”
One can only imagine. The gift was anonymous. Ali had no way of acknowledging it or paying it back but damned if she were going to just let it pass.
So, she decided to — what’s that expression? — pay it forward, exponentially.
On Sunday, every mother in the hospital at McMaster with her child is going to wake up to a beautiful bag full of treats. Bath products, face masks, Tim Hortons cards, Kit Kat bars, earrings, makeup, scrunchies, shower gel, day cream, night cream, maple sugar candy and more.
Ali, 32, has put together 100 of these bags. She’s had a lot of help from Rhett’s (he’s 22 months now) big brother, Bronson, almost four, and husband, Kyle Passow.
Rhett, propped up in the loving arms of his grandmother (Joanne Johns), looks on curiously as Bronson puts some fancy coloured tissue paper in one of the bags and hands it to Ali.
Rhett is a cute little guy with round blue glasses and one of only a thousand or so in the whole world with a genetic mutation involving PIGO, a protein coding gene. It affects his urination and digestion as well as some areas of development and there are auto-immune issues but his life expectancy is not shortened. Still, as Ali lovingly puts it, his health is a “complex” case, he is attended to by the complex care team at McMaster, and the condition can result in stresses to the kidneys.
The pregnancy and the pregnancy tests were completely normal, says Ali, but about two months after he was born he had urine backing up in his bladder and his belly was distended. That was the first of many visits she and Kyle have made to McMaster with various issues such as dehydration but no clear diagnosis emerged. So last fall doctors started genetic testing and in November they had their answer: PIGO.
The hospital visits seem to come in clusters and they were almost weekly between March and October of last year. There was a good three months stretch over these last Christmas holidays when they didn’t have to go. Now it’s been a couple of months since they’ve had to go.
“It’s starting to get easier on us as he is getting older,” says dad Kyle, who shares a birthday, June 27, with his almost two-year-old.
Rhett is looking relatively healthy and happy on this day in early May but there are sleep issues and he’s usually up several times a night.
The family rolls on, fortified by love and closeness, Branson is the most patient and sensitive big brother, say Ali and Kyle, and they all keep busy, not just with Ali’s big Mother’s Day project but the family is also moving (this weekend, of all things) from Lynden to Flamborough.
“People have been so generous,” says Ali, of her Mother’s Day project. Friends and others heard about what she was doing and stepped up with gifts — the scrunchies were made by someone just around the corner, the Lynden General Store pitched in, as did Lush cosmetics, Hunters Maple Bush in Troy and many others.
Ali also raves about the parent community at McMaster Children’s Hospital. “If a mom is having a bad struggle, another will come up and offer to hold their baby, while they go for a walk or a break.”
But, will Ali have time do something special for her own mom this Mother’s Day?
“She’s already given me the best present by doing this,” says a beaming Joanne. What better gift for a mother than the proof, all around in her in the hundred bags, that she has raised a good and thoughtful person who does for others.
“This world needs more kindness,” says Joanne.
More than ever. Happy Mother’s Day.