Somerdale family awaits toddler's double transplant surgery

Courier Post | Christina Mitchell

Nonprofit a lifeline

Carol O’Brien has the gift of gab, not a bad thing when your child has waited two years for a rare heart-lung transplant.

The 35-year-old Somerdale resident can describe with ease medical conditions like heterotaxy syndrome and complex congenital heart disease to those not familiar with her world, where “normal” seems to the rest of us obscenely unbearable.

So it’s no big deal to be at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia every two weeks, where the measures that keep her 3½-year-old son Riley alive until he gets a transplant are monitored by doctors, nurses and a social worker happy to help Riley with his iPad as his mother chats with their pediatric pulmonologist.

“It’s comfortable here,” Carol says of the hospital. “We always say we have to get in our CHOP mode.

Read more: http://www.courierpostonline.com/article/20111207/NEWS01/312070029/Somerdale-family-awaits-toddler-s-double-transplant-surgery?odyssey=nav%7Chead