Giving back to a life-saving team
14-year-old AAMC patient donates gifts to pediatrics unit that saved her life
Needles.
That’s the first thing 14-year-old Hailey Smith says when asked what she remembers about her time in the hospital.
“I only remember the bad parts,” she said. But that’s not entirely true.
At 7 years old in 2012, Hailey was diagnosed with an ear infection. A few days later, doctors said pneumonia. In less than a week, something more severe started taking over. She woke up after sleeping for almost a whole day and didn’t recognize her family.
Kristin Smith rushed her daughter from their Edgewater home to Anne Arundel Medical Center, where tests were done. The next day, she was asked to make final arrangements for her daughter.
Just as Smith began to prepare for her daughter’s death, Dr. Marc Callender stepped in and saved her life. He recognized her symptoms as bacterial meningitis, a rare form he hadn’t seen in decades. After more tests, spinal taps, a mega dose of antibiotics and tubes in her ear, Hailey started coming around.
At that point, Callender and nurse Pam Schwartz became more than Hailey’s caretakers — they became her friends.
“They sat right next to me. They didn’t leave my side,” Hailey said. “Instead of just sticking me with needles, they talked to me about what they would do.”
Smith credits the pediatrics team with saving her daughter’s life.
“We could never repay them,” she said.
Yet, they try.
For the fifth year in a row, Hailey has used her birthday and Christmas money and campaigned for donations to give the AAMC pediatrics team. This is her biggest year yet. She’s collected about $2,000 in gifts for the team and toys for children in the same position she was in seven years ago.
The Smiths wheeled two wagons full of bubbles, movies, birthday party supplies, baby toys, toy cars and trucks, bracelets, crafts, Barbies, stress balls and kinetic sand into the pediatrics unit on Friday along with about five courses of catered meals and gift baskets for Callender, Schwartz and the rest of the team.
“When you go to the hospital, you forget things. You don’t think to grab a toy or something to occupy the baby,” Smith said. “This year we went all out. If you share your story, it goes out to everyone.”
Every year the donation is a surprise, but the team has come to suspect the Smiths are coming. They usually have a little something prepared for Hailey, too.
Before Schwartz started her shift, she and the Smiths embraced and exchanged presents, turning the pediatric floor into something like a family home on Christmas morning.
“It’s so nice to see her grow. It’s what makes this job so rewarding,” Schwartz said. “She just does so much and puts it all on herself. She’s giving and strong.”
Hailey is studying STEM at Central Middle School and wants to go to Harvard to be a veterinarian or a doctor like Callender. When she turns 16, she’ll start volunteering for the pediatric team at AAMC. She’s also in the early stages of turning her donation tradition into a nonprofit.
Callender knew he wouldn’t be in town for the donation drop-off, but he did buy Hailey a professional stethoscope. Schwartz made her a blanket and gave her the book “HerStory: 50 Women and Girls Who Shook Up the World.”
“I can see you in this book one day,” Schwartz wrote inside.
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