*there's a movie & a some heroes

I was going to wait until we had actually seen it to share this, but that might be awhile. I checked it out from the library once but realized we didn't have time to sit and watch a movie while Will was in the hospital. What was I thinking? Maybe we'll try to have a movie night soon.

Something the Lord Made was released on HBO in 2004. It is based on a true story and was nominated for and won several awards including the Emmy for Best Made For Television Movie.

Here is a summary I found on the Johns Hopkins website where the surgery was performed:

"HBO’S new film, Something The Lord Made, starring Alan Rickman, Mos Def, Mary Stuart Masterson, Kyra Sedgwick and Charles Dutton, tells the moving story of an unusual partnership at The Johns Hopkins Hospital between one of the nation’s pioneering surgeons, Alfred Blalock, and his young African-American lab assistant, Vivien Thomas. Coming of age in different worlds, they nevertheless forged a poignant and sometimes stormy relationship to develop the so-called Blue Baby operation and usher in a golden age of heart surgery. The Blue Baby operation, which surgically corrected a congenital defect of the heart known as the Tetralogy of Fallot, broke the last barrier to operating directly on the heart, long considered taboo and an impossibility."   

The reasons this is interesting to us is because not only is TOF Will's exact heart defect, but the setting of the movie begins in Nashville at Vanderbilt. If you do actually watch the movie here's a clarification...the surgery developed in the movie is the Blalock-Taussig Shunt. Although I'm not positive about the details of Will's TOF, I don't think the shunt will be part of his repair.

Will was born during a fortunate time. I found this statistic here: "From 1940 to 1959, only 10 percent of patients born with complex heart defects survived to adulthood. By comparison, from 1980 to 1989, nearly 80 percent have survived." I couldn't find more recent information, but that was 20 years ago and I would guess that the percentage has only improved since. If Will needs an additional repair in the future, it is likely that something less invasive than OHS will be available and commonplace by then. I'm so grateful that Will's CHD isn't more complicated and because of medical advances he will probably only need a major surgery once.

Now for another kind of hero:

Olympic gold medalist Shaun White is rum.ored to have TOF.

 His bio acknowledges a heart defect that required surgery when he was young.

   

This is a lot more activity than we anticipated 

Will being able to do!

 Pretty inspiring.