Rouge Valley Health System staff in Ajax make Christmas brighter for local family

For the last three years, Ingrid Victory has been working as a nurse in the Intensive Care Unit at Rouge Valley Health System in Ajax.

Now Victory and her colleagues have set aside some personal time to do something extra special for a patient named Bri and her family.

“She has been here for 106 days,” said Victory. “She has Muscular Dystrophy. We were optimizing her so she could go home. Unfortunately, that did not happen and she had to return to the ICU and I thought that means she will be spending Christmas with us.”

Bri and her husband Lucan have three children: Loriann, Leah and Lorenzo. All of them have one wish this Christmas.

“That their mom could come home for one day or even a week,” said Victory. “I think that touched me a lot.”

For the last seven months, the nurses and staff in the ICU have watched these kids visit their mom every day. Their dad had to give up his job in order to take care of his wife and the children, adding financial pressure to this holiday season.

So after everything the close knit family has had to deal with, this team of dedicated hospital employees decided they would surprise Bri and Lucan and personally buy presents for each child this Christmas.

“Mama’s been here for a while,” said Lucan Reynolds, Bri’s husband. “We really were looking forward to her coming home for the holidays, but seeing that they put all this together, it is going to make the holidays even better than we expected it to be.’