Kimberly: standing straight and tall
GUEST BLOG: Barnaby Southgate, Senior Specialist, Content Writer, SickKids FoundationThe best person to tell a patient story is the patient herself. And Kimberly is one highly articulate fourteen-year-old: when asked what SickKids has meant to her, she begins, crisply; “For me, SickKids was an extraordinary opportunity…”
Kimberly had emigrated to Canada with her parents, Jennifer and Bernard, from Uganda. Soon after, the family consulted the doctors at SickKids about Kimberly’s scoliosis. Since she was still growing, the physicians, in Kimberly’s words, “said it would be better to operate when I grew up.” (Which, for Kimberly, meant having surgery at the ripe old age of 12, in 2014.)
Before the operation, life was tough – I was kind of restricted.
She’d fallen in love with theatre young. She’d signed up to be in her school’s production of ‘Beauty and the Beast’, but surgery intervened. This year, she made her debut in ‘Aladdin’. “I liked wearing the Arabian clothes and singing the ‘Aladdin’ songs,” says Kimberly. That’s one dream fulfilled, post-surgery. But Kimberly’s ambitions stretch further. As an adult, she wants to give back, helping kids in her home country receive better education and healthcare.
The possibilities in Kimberly’s life would be far fewer without donors who’ve also decided to give back. Donors help make SickKids the hospital it is. “I was afraid before surgery,” says Kimberly, “but everyone treated me like a friend. They were my other family.”
