Baby Warrior’s Story

Imagine being pregnant with not your second, third, or fourth child, but your tenth. Imagine going into pre-term labor and living nowhere near a hospital that can provide adequate emergency obstetrics care. You are referred to a hospital ten hours away. You finally arrive. An emergency c-section is required. You hemorrhage badly, barely surviving. Your baby is born with special needs. He is put in the hospital nursery.

You are discharged and journey home where your husband cares for you and your nine children. Meanwhile, the baby remains hospitalized. Your husband returns to the hospital to bring your baby home, taking the ten-hour journey again. He arrives and is told your baby has died. He goes to the hospital morgue asking for the body of your son. He is told there is a fee to release the body. With no money, your husband goes outside to sweep the street and beg. After a few hours of begging, still without enough money, he faces the wrenching decision to head home. Your entire family needs him there.

Months later workers from Child Services appear on your doorstep. They tell you they have your son. You tell them they have the wrong family. Yes, you gave birth a few months ago but your son died in the hospital. The workers leave. Weeks later Child Services calls. “Actually, your baby didn’t die. He’s alive. And the La Ceiba office is caring for him.”

Can you imagine the disbelief? The elation? The tears? This is the story of baby Warrior, born in Honduras. With a mix up in the hospital, Warrior’s parents were told he died but he was very much alive. Then no one came to take him home from the hospital and he was placed in a foster home. MedSend grant recipient, Dr. Judith Blumhofer was Warrior’s foster parent for the first five months of his life. Day in and day out she cared for this precious baby who had special needs and was apart from his family.

Dr. Blumhofer recalls the moment she got to introduce Warrior to his mother and father: “‘Are you the mom?’ I asked. She nodded. I introduced myself, then asked if she’d like to hold her son. As I placed Warrior in her arms…Mom’s eyes welled up with tears as she gingerly held Warrior.”

Dr. Blumhofer reflected on her role as both pediatrician and foster parent: “What a privilege it was to welcome Warrior into our home and care for him in his time of need; what an even greater privilege it has been to see him re-integrate to his family and be invited to walk alongside the family as they care for this precious child.”

“I work with the abandoned and discarded of society, the hopeless that, for a variety of reasons, have been written off. Yet their worth before the Father is beyond compare. MedSend helps make it possible. I have no idea where I would be finding the time to track down donors to help pay these loans or if I even would be able to find them! But MedSend takes on that concern, and frees me to serve the people in front of me.”

Dr. Judy Blumhofer is a pediatrician and foster parent serving at Loma de Luz Hospital in Honduras.