The Heart of an Orphan by Amy Eldridge

Author:Amy Eldridge [Eldridge, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UNKNOWN
Published: 2016-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

Healing Homes

One of the things we learned pretty quickly in working with really sick children is that in many cases you can’t just “do a surgery” and then discharge a child directly back to an orphanage. I will, with much regret, say that we learned this the hard way, after watching several children we had helped with heart surgeries develop life-threatening chest infections when they returned to orphanages to lie flat in cribs all day. Anyone who has been through surgery themselves knows that you need a dedicated caregiver following most operations. In many crowded orphanages, that just isn’t possible. Additional ethical questions were raised for us on whether you should ever do surgery on a child, even one who is dying, if you can’t be assured that adequate post-op care will be available to them. We knew that in order to solve these issues, we needed a safe place for them to go after their surgeries. We envisioned a transitional unit where kids could go for nurturing care after their hospitalization before returning to their home orphanages after they were considered fully healed.

In 2006, thanks to our friends the Hills, we were offered a large room inside the Hope Foster Home outside of Beijing to create a nine-bed "step-up, step-down" unit for medically fragile children. We decided we needed the “step-up” part as well as we had sent many babies directly from orphanages to the hospital who arrived too thin and malnourished to undergo major surgery. Our new medical unit at Hope would be a welcoming place for babies to both prepare for their operations and then recover post-surgery. We decided to call the unit “Heartbridge,” as we wanted it to be a bridge to health for all the children we sent there. It was such a beautiful room, with red homemade quilts and sunshine streaming through the windows, and almost instantly it was full of children, with a waiting list of kids also needing a bed.

In 2007, I told Joyce and Robin that we simply couldn’t keep up with the medical requests we were getting from orphanages due to a lack of post-op bed space, and they generously agreed to give us a second room to bring Heartbridge up to 18 beds. I could write an entire book on the stories of the kids who have gone through the arms of Heartbridge nannies as every single one of them is a miracle to me, especially since most arrived in such fragile states.

One Heartbridge story started with a little boy we called Max, who was from a rural orphanage several provinces over from Beijing. At the time, we were doing a lot of medical work in his city, and the local orphanage director had called us about a newborn baby they had found with anal atresia, a life-threatening condition which often requires surgery within the first 48 hours of life. Many babies with this condition are given temporary colostomies, a surgical procedure that brings one end of the large intestine out through an opening in the child’s abdominal wall.

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