You never quite know what life is going to throw your direction. Nobody knows this better than Liz Smith, a nurse who was the director of nursing at a children’s hospital in Massachusetts.
She had tried to become a mother for many years but had no idea that something would be waiting for her in connection with her work. Her dream of becoming a mother came true but it came true in a most unusual way.
Unfortunately, she was only 19 years old when her mother died of cancer. She decided that she wanted to do what her mother did so she became a nurse.
Throughout the years, Liz had struggled with infertility so she couldn’t have a family of her own. That is when she saw a patient where she worked, in the NICU.
The eight-month-old baby girl, named Gisele was transferred to the hospital. She was born prematurely because of her mother’s drug addiction and was suffering from those effects.
When Gisele was born she was only 2 pounds. When Liz saw her, she was receiving specialized drugs to help with her breathing and had a feeding tube. The saddest part was that the baby had not been visited in five months.
Social services were busy trying to place the little girl in a foster home and Liz knew that something needed to be done. Every day, she visited the little girl after her shift and finally, she got the word that she was approved to be a foster parent.
“You can’t just be some kid [who’s] an offspring of famous people and make. You actually have to put in effort,” he repeated the advice his parents gave him. “They’ve really drilled that into my head.”
Although she was a foster parent, the state was still trying to get the little girl back together with her birth parents. They had weekly supervised visits, but they didn’t really materialize.
On the other, Gisele was beginning to do quite well and eventually, her birth parents were deemed incapable of being parents.
That meant that Liz was able to adopt a little girl so she move things forward.
“The day I got the call that their parental rights were terminated was very sad,” she said in an interview with The Washington Post. “My gain was another’s loss.”
It was in October 2018 that it was official. She was the legal parent of the little girl and they became an official family.
Source: The Washington Post