Ace Breaking News – Picture a Christmas tree twinkling with fairy lights. It looks delightful, but it’s missing the shiny baubles, the colourful tinsel, a star on top, and those neatly wrapped presents underneath. Isn’t it interesting how a few decorations can change the whole vibe?
The wishing tree at the Queensland Children’s Hospital in South Brisbane stands 24 hours a day, seven days a week all through the year.
Tied to its branches are heartfelt messages — hundreds of them — often written in the wobbly handwriting of children, complete with spelling mistakes.
“I wish and hope spider man saves you all,” one says.
“I wish that my family had happiness,” says another.
“I wish that I don’t go blind.”
“I wish my ellergy [sic] with milk … is gone so I can eat a cheezeburger [sic].”
“I wish all the bad goes away.”
If only every wish would come true.
‘Tis the season for hope, joy and peace after all.
Life-saving halo
On this December day, Grace Hill stands beside the tree, a smile rarely leaving her face.
Four blood-stained dots on her forehead are a legacy of her own four-month stay in the hospital — marks left after spending weeks in a halo device, a metal brace attached to her skull, while awaiting surgery.
The 16-year-old was admitted to the Queensland Children’s Hospital in August with a chest infection and a progressive deformity in her spine. She was struggling to breathe.
Grace Hill, 16, has been in hospital for about four months. (ABC News: Mark Leonardi)normal
Her backbone was pressing on her trachea — the body’s windpipe.
“The compression was impacting … so badly it was possible that her trachea would collapse,” Grace’s mother Sarah Hill said.
“It’s happened very, very quickly and we’ve had to make very big decisions in a very short amount of time.
“This isn’t something that we knew about last year or that we’ve been able to talk about and process and plan for over a number of years.”
An unusual case
Mrs Hill said the halo, attached to a traction device, was designed to pull Grace’s spine away from her airways in preparation for an operation to correct the deformity, using metal rods and screws.
Grace said she went into the eight-hour procedure “very nervous and very scared”.
Grace Hill, pictured with her mum Sarah, required surgery for a severe spinal deformity. (ABC News: Janelle Miles)normal
The complex operation was performed while she was kept alive by an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine, which takes over the role of the heart and lungs — the first time it’s been used during spinal surgery at the Queensland Children’s Hospital (QCH).
Without ECMO, her spinal surgeon Geoff Askin said she would not have been able to breathe during the operation, and without the surgery, “she may not have been able to survive”.
“She was living on the edge, that’s for sure,” he said.
Dr Askin said the procedure required meticulous planning from a range of specialties, including anaesthetists, respiratory physicians, and heart and orthopaedic surgeons.
So many experts were required during the operation, the theatre was crowded — four anaesthetists, three cardiac surgeons, three spinal surgeons, nurses and other specialist health workers all looking after Grace.
“I counted 18 people at one stage,” Dr Askin said, admitting he was worried about the risks of the operation due to the teenager’s breathing difficulties.
Young patients at Queensland Children’s Hospital have written down their hopes and dreams for Christmas. (ABC News: Janelle Miles)normal
In more than four decades in medicine, he had never seen a similar case.
Grace’s surgery was a venture into the unknown.
But three weeks later, she is doing “very well”.
“Much better than any of us thought she would,” Dr Askin said.
“When you have a hospital as big as QCH and you utilise all the facilities and the specialties … and you plan it well, then you can do things that you never really thought you could have done.
“It only happens when you’ve got a really good team of people.”
Thanks to the gifts of many health workers, Grace will be home in Algester, on Brisbane’s southside, with her parents, younger sister Lucy, 11, and their dogs this Christmas.
Milinh’s gingerbread house
But not every child with health challenges will be well enough to be discharged from hospital during the festive season.
Upstairs from the wishing tree, which is on the hospital’s ground floor, five-year-old Milinh Rosendale sits in a bed, recovering from open heart surgery.
Milinh was born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome — when the heart’s left pumping chamber fails to develop properly in the womb and is much smaller than usual.
Her wishes for Christmas are simple.
Milinh Rosendale hopes to celebrate the festive season with her family in Townsville. (ABC News: Mark Leonardi)normal
Along with the doll’s house and wireless ear buds she’s asked Santa for in a letter, the Cairns prep student desperately wants to spend Christmas with relatives in north Queensland, including sister Dulcie.
“I like to do Christmas with my family in Townsville,” she said, clutching a masked teddy bear, a gift from her cousins.
Volunteers have decorated Milinh Rosendale’s room, turning it into a gingerbread house. (ABC News: Janelle Miles)normal
Milinh’s mum Tenetia Wallis said whether they get to Townsville for Christmas would depend on how well she recovered from last month’s surgery.
“It all depends on her body,” Ms Wallis said.
“We’re waiting to see what her body does.”
If she must stay in hospital over Christmas, volunteers have tried to make the experience as joyful as possible, turning her room into Milinh’s gingerbread house, with a present from Santa and his elves sticky-taped to the door.
Not all gifts are wrapped
What a blessing the kindness of strangers is.
Addison Kemp has been a regular at the Queensland Children’s Hospital since March, when she was diagnosed with aplastic anaemia — a rare, life-threatening blood disorder in which the bone marrow stops making enough new blood cells.
Five-year-old Addison Kemp wished for snow this Christmas. (ABC News: Mark Leonardi)normal
The five-year-old was the subject of an international search for a bone marrow donor after her sister Crimson was ruled out because she was not a 100 per cent match.
After three agonising months for her parents Bianca and Daniel, a match was found about 15,000 kilometres away in the United Kingdom.
“It was pretty much do or die at that point,” Ms Kemp said.
“She was so severe with it. We were very lucky.”
Ms Kemp, of Wellington Point just outside of Brisbane, said the bone marrow and blood donations have kept her daughter alive.
“Her life has been saved over 40 times easily just by selfless people, going and giving a donation, giving their time so that she could be here.”
Addison Kemp with sister Crimson at the Queensland Children’s Hospital. (ABC News: Janelle Miles)normal
For the Kemps and many other families, the best gifts don’t always come neatly wrapped.
“They’re wrapped in humans that walk into donation centres and give blood and give platelets,” Ms Kemp said.
Addison is back in hospital after developing seizures and meningitis — an infection and inflammation of the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord.
Addison’s Christmas wish is “for a lifetime of Christmases”.
She takes anti-rejection drugs because of the bone marrow transplant, making her vulnerable to infection.
If she’s still in hospital on Christmas Day, as expected, her mum is determined the family will be together regardless, grateful for the gift of health care.
Ms Kemp has told the nurses on the ward the whole family will sleep there on Christmas Eve — mum, dad and their two little girls.
Christmas wish
Before Grace Hill’s hospital admission, she competed in dance competitions and hoped to teach dance after leaving school.
Her life was dancing. It was part of her identity, where her main friendship group is.
At one point, doctors feared she may never dance again.
“The team are saying they are confident now that she’ll be able to dance,” her mother said.
“Whether that’s at a level that she’s been at, we don’t know yet and we won’t know for a little while.”
But when Grace is asked what her single biggest wish is this Christmas, it’s not herself she’s thinking about.
“I just wish that everybody in the hospital has a good Christmas,” she said.
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