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‘This is your why’
When Grant Falls was born in 2022, his parents, Laura and Seth, had a traumatic start to life with their son. His condition was far worse than they expected when the doctors noticed he had a heart problem in utero.
After he was born, Laura actually couldn’t see him until the day after his birth because of the immediate need to treat his heart defect. Seth took her in a wheelchair to the ICU.
“I was seeing double still,” she remembers, “and I got there, and I was like, ‘OK, so when are we going to a room?’ And they were like, ‘No, this is your room.’ The ICU. That picture was, like, 15 pumps of IVs hooked up to a little baby.”
Things intensified over the next two months as Grant had open-heart surgery, intubation, and was listed for a heart transplant.
“I struggled so much at the beginning wondering why,” she relates, “‘Why us? Why my baby?’ The movies aren’t like this. You just have the perfect birth, go home, and be with your baby and your family. That didn’t happen.”
But Laura also noticed other mothers going through similar situations. Her own experience had made her a bit of a veteran in the ICU.
“I think it was probably not even a month after we had already been there—our room was the very first room in the ICU,” she explained. “So, whoever came in, I would see coming in. I remember seeing the broken moms. At that point, I was a month or two months in. So, I started having a routine of what I was doing every day. I was able to function.
“[The hospital] has everything for kids. They don’t have anything for parents. And if I could bring an ounce of comfort to any of that, that’s what I would like to do.”
“But these people are coming in, and they’re also first-time moms, or are moms whose lives are flipped upside down. So, you’re just a zombie, and you’re learning the new medical language. Nothing makes sense anymore.”
That was the beginning of “Mom Bags,” a collection of toiletries, snacks, and helpful resources intended to make a terrible situation a little more bearable. The first distribution was pretty simple.
“[The hospital] has everything for kids. They don’t have anything for parents. And if I could bring an ounce of comfort to any of that, that’s what I would like to do.”
That first small outreach happened in the midst of Grant’s yearlong ordeal in the hospital. After months of gaining strength, Grant finally had a 12-hour heart transplant surgery. There were struggles in his recovery, including a cardiac arrest as his body adapted to working without a machine helping to pump his blood. The doctors had decided to put him back on a heart machine, called an ECMO, to assist his new heart.
“They hadn’t closed [his heart],” she recalls, “So, [resuscitating him] was extremely fast, not even 10 minutes before the surgeon came and told us the heart looks great. He just needs to rest.”
Seth and Laura—members at Inglewood Baptist Church in Grand Prairie—went home with Grant after a year. Grant was growing stronger, facing a variety of effects from his stay in the hospital but recovering. But early last year, doctors discovered a cancerous mass on Grant’s liver. Over the next nine months, doctors attempted unsuccessfully to remove the mass surgically, and then consulted with clinics around the country to know how to treat the little boy.
“So, he did … three or four rounds of chemo,” Laura remembers, “and then his numbers were coming down, but we still needed to get the mass out because it would still spread to his lungs and then to his brain.
“In September, we went to Houston because they were confident that they could just get it … they literally didn’t even have to open him up” she said. “They stuck a needle into his liver and microwaved it for two minutes and it was gone. We got to go back to the hotel the same day.”
Although Grant continues to see his doctors and faces some relatively minor procedures to clean up the aftereffects of his treatments, he’s a growing and happy little boy. Laura credits God for all the amazing things her family has come through.
“There’s no other way we would have gotten through this without God,” she says. “There’s no way. We have seen so many miracles performed because of God. And He did it multiple times. We would sit there in these crazy situations, whether he was having a cardiac arrest or going for surgery or having a transplant. We just prayed, and then we asked others to come together and pray for him and for us. And honestly … I could feel the stress come off when I know that God is going to help us get through all of it.”
Even though the Falls are spending less time in the hospital these days, Laura’s ministry among mothers has continued—even grown.
“There’s no other way we would have gotten through this without God. There’s no way.”
“Social work messaged me last week and said the [most recent] 15 bags that I brought were already given out,” she said, “and several of the mothers were just moved to tears and so incredibly grateful.
“I got a message from someone’s relative who received one, about how thankful they were that they had this. Because you can’t think of anything. You don’t want to eat, you don’t want to leave the room.
“And I have tons of friends now …. [Sometimes] our old nurse reaches out to say, ‘Hey, can you talk to this mom?’ Or I’m on these groups on Facebook that I’ve met parents through. I’ve been to the parent group they hold on Wednesdays. When we have appointments, sometimes I’ll stop in and I’ll talk to parents that are [in ICU] currently and give them hope.”
Laura is seeing God use their experience with Grant’s first two years in ways she couldn’t have seen in 2022, in her own life and in the lives of others.
“My relationship with God has strengthened so much throughout all of this,” she said. “I was talking with one of [Grant’s] previous nurses yesterday about the Mom Bags. And she was like, ‘Remember when you were inpatient and you kept saying, ‘Why? Why us? Why is this happening?’ She’s like, ‘This is your why.’”
