Late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel used his opening monologue Monday night to give an emotional account of how his newborn son was diagnosed with tetralogy of Fallot. Tetralogy of Fallot (TOF) is a congenital heart condition marked by four defects: a hole in the heart; the aorta lying over the hole; an obstruction from the heart to…
***The following contains graphic details*** It’s a tragic experience I’ll never forget. When I was a med student, I saw a 4-year-old girl with a large tear in her vagina that required extensive surgery. The family said the child fell on the top of a plunger. The examination proved otherwise. The mother’s boyfriend ended up…
The sports world was rocked over the weekend when former NFL player Todd Heap accidentally ran over and killed his 3-year-old daughter while backing up his truck in the family’s driveway. Unfortunately, this is a very common tragedy in the U.S. According to KidsAndCars.org, at least 50 children are backed over by vehicles every week,…
Feb. 27, 2007, is a date that will be engrained in my mind forever. It was the day I found out I had cancer. I had a brain tumor and hydrocephalus, and had to get surgery and start treatment right away. As a little kid I had no idea what these words meant or how…
It’s Eastertime and that means children are looking forward to dying Easter eggs. While it’s easy to hop on over to your local store to pick up a package of artificial dyes, it’s even more fun to make your own out of natural ingredients. You might even spark an interest in a new vegetable your…
I met him on hospital day 79. There he was — a toddler who was in his third month in the pediatric intensive care unit at Norton Children’s Hospital. He required a life-saving operation to remove part of his skull and put in a tube to drain fluid from his swollen brain. The poor child…
It’s not uncommon for a wild child to turn into a couch potato teen, but a new study finds the slowdown in activity happens long before the onset of puberty. The British Journal of Sports Medicine reports that sedentary behaviors start to develop at the ripe old age of 7. The researchers studied 400 kids…
Shortly after he was born, Evan Karr was diagnosed with tetralogy of Fallot, a congenital heart defect that occurs in around five of every 10,000 babies born. It’s one of the most common heart defects and is actually four defects in one, involving a hole between the chambers of the heart, a narrowing of the…
Our kids argue about everything we ask them to do. But earlier this month, when my wife and I asked if they wanted to go to the local high school track, they were in the car before we had even changed clothes. We went with a plan to run and they went to have fun,…
It was spring of 1985 when 14-year-old Maria appeared in the Norton Children’s Hospital burn unit. She’d been flown to Louisville from Ecuador and she really needed help. More than a third of her body had been torched — for an unknown reason she had put gasoline in her hair and walked by an open…
Whip this breakfast favorite up and add a fruity twist to the pancake batter. It’s a family favorite. Pancake-coated apple rings Makes 6 servings (about 18 rings) 3 large apples, cored and sliced into about 6 rings 3/4 cup whole-wheat flour 1/4 cup quick oats 2 tablespoons milled flaxseed 1 tablespoon brown sugar 2 teaspoons…
In 1986, Robbie Cardin became Norton Children’s and Kentucky’s first pediatric heart transplant patient. As you can imagine, his plight was covered by the media. Robbie was referred to as “Baby Calvin” to protect his family’s privacy. Robbie was born by cesarean section at Hardin Memorial Hospital in Elizabethtown, Kentucky. Doctors knew right away something…