Once upon a time…
Brandon Lee, Fargo, an athletic 9-year-old, began having painful headaches. The headaches continued to get worse, and on New Year's Eve 2002, he could no longer tolerate the pain. His parents, Kimi and Jason, rushed him to MeritCare Emergency Center, where doctors discovered a tumor behind his eye.
Twenty-month-old Simon Nelson, Hitterdal, Minn., nearly froze to death. It was a bitterly cold, 10-degree night in 2001 when Simon wandered from his home wearing only pajamas. His dad, Brian, found him at 4:30 a.m. lying in the snow about 100 yards from the house, seemingly lifeless. When emergency crews arrived, Simon did not have a pulse.
Michael Nelson remembers being flat on his back on a football field in Barrett, Minn. It was a Friday night game in late September, and he'd just attempted a tackle for his Breckenridge Cowboys. "When I hit the ground, it felt like I'd crushed my neck," says the 6-foot-2, 180-pound, 16-year-old. "After that, I just lay there, numb. I didn't have any pain, but I couldn't feel anything either.
When Michaela woke up with the sniffles and a cough on a Monday morning in early January, her parents, Mike and Kristi Garbow, had no idea that two days later, their 2½-year-old would be airlifted in life-threatening condition to MeritCare Children's Hospital in Fargo.
Lisa Bjergaard wasn't alarmed when her 8-year-old son Danny woke up feeling a little sick on a Monday morning last February. A flu bug had been making the rounds, causing many kids to be absent from school. But the next day, he wasn't any better. "Danny went from sitting in my lap eating breakfast on Tuesday morning to being fully life supported on medical equipment by 4 that afternoon," says Lisa. "What happened was unbelievable."
When Leah was 4 months old, her parents, Mike and Nancy, picked her up from day care and discovered she was having convulsions. An ambulance rushed her to MeritCare in Fargo. She had life-threatening injuries, including a severe brain injury, likely caused by shaken baby syndrome. Leah spent the next two weeks in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at MeritCare Children's Hospital, where she received high-level care from a team of pediatric specialists. She survived, overcoming the first milestone, but that was just the beginning.