“Miracle Kid” Peyton Adam sits on his father Tyler’s shoulders as they watch Erlanger Hospital’s introduction of its 2014 group of “Miracle Children,” tree lighting, and holiday parade in the medical mall Tuesday, Dec. 2, 2014, in Chattanooga, Tenn.
For a few minutes in the Medical Mall at Erlanger Hospital on Tuesday, there was no talk of leukemia, or cerebral palsy, the days fighting for life on ventilators and in incubators.
No — the talk about T.C. Thompson Children’s Hospital at Erlanger’s 2015 Miracle Children on Tuesday was about how they loved pizza. And Transformers. And Curious George, cartwheels and dancing. There was talk about how they want to be artists and singers and doctors.
They are kids who had spent plenty of time at the hospital, to the point where it has been a second home. But Tuesday was about celebrating how much bigger their worlds have become.
Staff members at T.C. Thompson Children’s Hospital at Erlanger nominate the Miracle Children every year. They are kids who have made a deep impact, children fighting tough battles or who have overcome steep odds.
This year there are 21 Miracle Children in all.
They are kids like 3-year-old Emerson Doty, who darted and danced across the Medical Mall as the festivities wound down. Looking at her, it can be easy for her mother to forget the utter despair she felt when she found out her baby girl was born completely deaf because of a genetic defect.
Cristin Doty would have never dreamed that her daughter would one day be able to sing along to songs or make up her own. But a bilateral cochlear implant at nine months old allows her to do just that.
Cobi Spencer, 19, was the oldest of the bunch at Tuesday’s ceremony. But the business student at Dalton State was happy to be nominated and to stand among the others, he said. It was the little kids like these in the hospital wards who made him smile when he was being wheeled into CT scans for his heart earlier this year.
Cobi was in the hospital for a month last spring after he blacked out and was rushed to Erlanger. There doctors found a golf-ball-sized tumor crowding the space between Cobi’s heart and his esophagus. Infections caused a wall of his heart and a lung to collapse. Doctors told his family he was close to death. But Cobi fought through it.
“They were amazing,” he says of his doctors and nurses. “They just took care of me, in all kinds of ways.”
When he could drink for the first time in months, one nurse brought him her favorite kind of Gatorade.
It’s not possible for doctors to remove the mass, but Cobi has said he is learning to live with it. He’s worried about the hole still in his esophagus — that he may get put on the feeding tube again — but he stays optimistic. He got to eat some of his mom’s Coca-Cola ham for Thanksgiving this year.
Cristin Doty has that same spirit when she talks about the son she expects to deliver in two weeks. The baby has a 25 percent chance of being deaf, but the mother no longer feels despair.
When Emerson sometimes asks her if her baby brother will need “sound” — what she calls the implants — Cristin tells her maybe. And if so, it will be OK. Emerson can even help teach him how to communicate.
“I look at her and how far she’s come,” Cristin says, looking at her daughter. “She gives me hope.”
Contact staff writer Kate Harrison Belz at kbelz@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6673.