Calgary mom Kimberly Mackie remembers exactly what her son said to her the moment he woke up after having surgery to drain a cyst that had ruptured in his brain.
“He opened his eyes, he looked at me and he said, ‘Mama, I’m hungry,'” said Mackie, recalling the moment from last May.
“So you know very well that the anesthesiologist (did an) amazing job, at that point, knowing that there were very minimal side effects of this grown man-child waking up and still having an appetite,” said Mackie, referring to her then-12-year-old son, Dini Muhidini, who stood about six feet five inches tall and weighed over 300 pounds at the time.
It’s been nearly a year since the surgery, and both Mackie and her son still marvel at the care he received at the Alberta Children’s Hospital.
“I’m really impressed, to be honest,” said Muhidini, who is now 13, “because of how they managed with me being so big.”
“He was always in the company of amazing people, with the doctors and nurses, and there was also a volunteer who played video games with Dini during his stay there,” added Mackie.
“He would just come and hang out with him and allowed him to be a kid within the hospital, even though he was going through something traumatic during that time.”
Mackie and Muhidini are sharing their story as part of the 19th annual Country 105 Caring for Kids Radiothon in support of the Alberta Children’s Hospital Foundation, which provides funding for pediatric research and education as well as specialized life-saving equipment at ACH.
“It’s amazing and very reassuring knowing that you have the ability to have the equipment in order to make sure kids can wake up and function with minimal side effects,” said Mackie, acknowledging the millions of dollars that are raised each year during the radiothon.
“The community involvement is amazing,” she said. “This is essentially equipment that the hospital needs, and it’s very beneficial to the doctors and all the staff working within, trying to be patient-oriented.”
Mackie and Muhidini are rallying around the anesthesia department at the hospital, which is hoping to acquire four new anesthetic pumps.
Dr. Jeremy Luntley, a pediatric anesthesiologist at ACH, says the new pumps alleviate anesthetists from having to do complicated, on-the-spot mathematical calculations, thereby allowing them to “more precisely balance the level of anesthetic that may be required.”
“For a patient like Dini, who is having critical brain surgery… If we get the dosage even slightly wrong when you’re a big guy, then you can take a long time to wake up,” said Luntley.
“So having these pumps on board enables us to get that dose just that little bit tighter, just that little bit more exact, and it means that someone like Dini would have a quicker and smoother wakeup.”
ACH currently owns one of the new pumps.
“We’ve managed to purchase one, which is in high usage,” said Luntley. “There usually is a little bit of a negotiation every morning as to who gets to use the pump.”
Luntley said he looks forward to the radiothon and seeing how southern Albertans come through for the hospital every year.
“We do somewhere in the region of, I don’t know, 15,000 to 20,000 anesthetics a year. Even if you’re using this in 10 to 20 per cent of the patients, there are many thousands of children who can benefit from having this technology available to them,” said Luntley.
“It would be huge” to get the news pumps, he added.