Today our niece, BryAnna, has had one of her greatest wishes come true . . . she left Riley Hospital without her trach for the first time in her life. For the first time she will breathe through her nose and mouth, rather than a tube inserted into her throat. After 10 years of wishing, hoping and waiting BryAnna can now enjoy what most of us daily take for granted. Bry has endured a couple dozen surgeries in her short time, and done so with an immense amount of sass and spunk. She has Treacher Collins Syndrome. But I hesitate to leave that as such a simple statement, because I don't want her to be defined by her syndrome, by her limitations. She is so much more beyond that. And she has constantly fought to not allow those limitations to control her. Today she won . . . for those of us who are her family and friends, we all won. But today has been preceded by many other days -- some won, some lost, some neither won nor lost, but were the in-between spaces where we j
A blog for old souls and childlike spirits.