“Get the oxygen, now!” What started as a routine check-up at the pediatrician, progressed to an ambulance ride to Greenville Memorial Hospital ED. Nora was born on New Years Day at Greenville Memorial, and seven weeks later, another physician here had discovered her heart’s fatal flaw. Nora had an undiagnosed congenital heart defect, ALCAPA, and her heart had swollen to “the size of a teenager’s” in her seven short weeks of life. The next few hours delivered a life-flight to MUSC, where Nora had corrective heart surgery to mend the defect. But after bouncing back-and-forth from Greenville to Charleston a few times, she was placed on the heart transplant waiting list and admitted indefinitely to bedspace in the MUSC Pediatric Cardiac ICU.

So, over the next seven months, we waited. We waited as first-time parents, together, and with Nora. My wife had planned to go back to work from maternity leave. I cut back to part-time. We were both Clemson alumni, with great jobs in Greenville, and with priorities shifted. We waited through the attending rounds, waited through the vital beeps that settled into our skulls, waited through setbacks and interventions … central line, feeding tube, ventilator, fentanyl patches, paralytics, dialysis, collapsed lungs, VAD, debilitating stroke. And, on September 2, 2016, Nora received the impossible gift of a new heart. A new heart from another grieving family in South Carolina.