Two weeks before Christmas in 2024, the Thompson family headed to the hospital in Saskatoon for a check up, when they found out their one-year-old son Bodie was in heart failure.
“We didn’t really know what his future would look like,” Celeste Thompson said. “When I say that, we didn’t know what he’s gonna look like in a week.”
They were airlifted to the Stollery Children’s Hospital on New Year’s Day, where Bodie underwent his second open-heart surgery.
Bodie was born with pulmonary atresia and a Ventricular Septal Defect (VSD).
Since then, he’s lived with a host of other health conditions, including Soto Syndrome: a rare, genetic disorder causing excessive growth in early childhood, impacting his physical and mental development.
“We knew that it would have some struggles and we knew that he would need several surgeries throughout his life,” she said. “They told us any surgeries would be needed at the Stollery.”
Of the 300 days Bodie has spent in hospital in his life, 200 of them were at the Stollery Children’s Hospital.
While they cared for their son, they had to make another difficult decision.
“We thought we were only going to be gone for two days, and then we just never went back,” Celeste Thompson said.
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“We already spent so much time displaced from home, in Edmonton at the Stollery. He had outgrown the care that could be offered to him back in Saskatchewan, so we made the decision just to move.”
Her husband went back to Yorkton to pack up the house and sell it, before moving permanently to Edmonton.
The Stollery is Western Canada’s referral centre for pediatric cardiac surgery.
“We do some really, really highly specialized care here that doesn’t occur anywhere else,” Christine Westerlund, the senior operating officer at the Stollery Children’s Hospital, told Global News.
“Forty per cent of our families are not from the Edmonton area.”
The Stollery has the largest catchment area of any children’s hospital in North America, covering more than half a million square kilometres from Winnipeg to Vancouver and up into the Northwest Territories.
The current site within the University of Alberta Hospital opened in 2001 and has 236 beds — the second-largest children’s hospital in Canada after SickKids in Toronto.
It has among the highest inpatient volumes of any children’s hospital in Canada, according to the province, seeing about 300,000 children per year.
“We knew it was the right decision (to move) because the care that he’s been receiving of the Stollery, that’s not something we could get anywhere else,” Celeste said.
Thompson has started an online journey to document what it’s like to be a “medical mom.”
She said it’s a way for her to feel less alone and to show the world the ins and outs living with a child with complex needs.
“People tend to forget about you when you’re in the hospital for longer periods of time,” she said. “It’s not all bad and sad and taboo, it’s my everyday life.”
“There can be some moments of joy throughout your medical journey and I just wanted to show people my everyday life and maybe how that was different from other people.”
She said she’s received positive comments and messages about how showing off her journey has helped others going through similar things.
“I don’t want to walk around being sad about my situation, I want to embrace it and normalize it.”
After another recent hospitalization, Bodie is back at his Edmonton home and doing better.
For the Thompsons, moving across provinces means they had to leave their support system behind, which Celeste said has been difficult — but the Stollery has become more than a place of medical care.
“It’s been a huge lifeline for us throughout this journey and I don’t know where we would be without it,” Celeste said.
The Thompson’s spoke to Global News as part of the 2026 Corus Radiothon. For more information or to donate visit stollerykids.com.
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