In so many ways it looked like a traditional holiday party – festive balloons, dancing, plenty of sweet treats and even a visit from the big man in red.
But for the families who gathered at Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children, there was another reason to celebrate the season – their children are thriving thanks to a life-saving organ transplant.
Children like Onyi Kenine, a bright-eyed 9-year-old from Wilmington who would have sparkled even without her blinking holiday headband. Onyi was 5 months old when she had a liver transplant.
Today, she’s a busy fourth-grader at Mount Pleasant Elementary School, juggling basketball and cheerleading along with other activities. She doesn’t mind coming back to Nemours for annual visits related to an operation she was too young to remember.
“There’s very nice people here,” she said.
The party on Saturday drew a few dozen families to the administration and research building auditorium, where transplant survivors as young as toddlers to those in their 20s danced to holiday music and grabbed cookies from the table of food. Children who were once at risk of dying early because of failing hearts, livers and kidneys raced through the tables, jumped on a giant SpongeBob moon bounce and sat for face painting.
For parents, it’s a chance to compare notes about long-term prognoses, school successes and other achievements. Even those long removed from the daily worries about medications and complications make the party an annual event.
“I feel so old being here, but I don’t like to miss it. I just love seeing the team,” said Gabrielle Archangelo, 23, of Wilmington, who had a liver transplant when she was 13 months old. “They’re almost like a second family to me.”
Though her years of being a pediatric patient are long past, she still maintains ties to the transplant staff and occasionally talks with families whose children are facing the same issues she did.
“It’s nice for them to see that their children are going to recover,” said Archangelo, who recently graduated with a nursing degree, her interest in medicine stoked by her experiences as a child.
The hospital’s solid organ transplant team has organized the annual party for more than a decade, holding it as a way for patients and their families to socialize with each other in a less-clinical setting. The team has performed more than 215 transplants since 1993. Several members of the staff, including transplant surgeons, came to the event, posing for pictures with their growing patients and grateful families.
“The only time I see these guys is when they are sick or in clinic,” said Bev Shreve, the social worker for the transplant team who organizes the party. “Just to see them do normal stuff is what is my favorite thing about this.”
Astrid Deleon had a liver and kidney transplant when she was just 3 months old. Ever since then, she’s come back for the party, glad for the chance to reconnect with the medical staff, even if means answering the same questions about school, her health and what she likes these days.
“It’s fun and not boring,” said Deleon, 14, of Lindenwold, N.J.
For families whose lives have been permanently touched by transplant, those smiling faces areanother reminder.
“You get to see the kids grow up,” said Robin Norris, whose daughter Alissa had a liver transplant 18 years ago. “That’s really the best part.”
