Perspective

by Ellen Sorenson

Hannah with
Grandma Sorenson

Watching Hannah’s journey to health, I keep reflecting on the lives of my ancestors. My grandmother lost four babies before my mother lived. Perhaps they died from the RH issues that led to the death of my own infant sister, or perhaps an infant suffered as Hannah does with an esophageal muscle constriction which left her unable to swallow or to breathe without choking. My grandmother told me that one infant son died because “he was just too smart; you could see it by looking into his eyes.”

Exceptional care at Utah Valley Hospital

In an earlier generation, there were no oxygen monitors to alert sleeping mothers when their babies needed air. Babies like Hannah simply died—suddenly when they couldn’t breathe or slowly because they couldn’t eat. There were no diagnoses. No barium swallow studies with x-rays to reveal a constricted throat. No manometries to analyze esophageal function. And there were no solutions—no carefully calibrated portable NG feeding tubes, no home oxygen canisters, and no drugs to counteract influenza and fevers and seizures. There were no surgical balloons, Botox shots, or myotomies to ease over-enthusiastic muscles.

Sadly, in much of the world today, little has changed. In our recent time in Nicaragua, we lived among wonderful people who lost newborn babies because of lack of intervention during labor and delivery and elderly parents to lack of access to dialysis treatments. We knew an eight-year-old who went to a dentist with a toothache, and the dentist pulled out a permanent molar. We saw people who were crippled because they did not have fractures set or who were bedridden or demented by severe anemia.

Volunteer groups providing meals in the Ronald McDonald
Family Room at Primary Children's Hospital

I am so grateful to live in a society that places the highest value on the life of one helpless infant and that has the resources to save her life. Hannah has interacted with dozens of caring nurses, doctors, ambulance drivers, technicians, and volunteers. Jenny and her family have been fed and sustained by the Ronald McDonald house, Boy Scout troops, and various church congregations. And behind the scenes there are untold hundreds of researchers, inventors, and manufacturers and distributors of medical supplies. There are unseen angels intervening from Heaven, friends nearby who offer dinners, babysitting, and rides to the doctor, and strangers across the country who pray for a little baby they have never met. There are truly Christ-like people who will surely reap great blessings. For Jesus taught, “In as much as ye have done it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”