Contest Entries

“Yes, Mr. Fletcher, it is very serious.”

These words, the ones no parent wants to hear, were delivered to me over the phone on Friday, July 20, 2007 by my daughter’s doctor. I was in San Destin at the summer convention of the Home Builders Association of Alabama and we had just learned Mary Kathryn had a brain tumor.

I really wasn’t even employed by the Greater Birmingham Association of Home Builders yet. I had accepted their offer to join the association as Executive Vice President beginning August 6th but they had asked me to join them at the summer convention anyhow. It was going to be a fun weekend and a chance to meet a lot of people before actually coming on board. Of course, it didn’t work out that way.

Mary Kathryn, or MK as she is known to most, hadn’t been feeling well for awhile. Frequent trips to many different doctors produced several different diagnoses, and many of her symptoms were written off to the “stress of being a 14 year old girl.” Little did we know the benign tumor growing inside her brain was the cause of them all.

On July 24 she underwent 9 hours of surgery. Thanks to the skill of the doctors and staff of Children’s Hospital in Birmingham, she came through the surgery very well, but not completely without complications. We knew going in that the tumor was located in an area that would cause the surgeons to have to disturb the part of her brain that controlled her right side motor skills. What we didn’t realize was that the “limited use” of her right arm, hand and leg would actually be paralysis and as a result of the surgery she would be unable to use her right arm or hand and be unable to walk or stand without assistance.

That’s where UAB’s Division of Pediatric Rehabilitation Medicine at Children’s Hospital came into play. They began working with MK just days after the surgery, attempting to restore to her the full and complete use of all her limbs. As we watched the doctors and therapists working with MK and other kids there at Children’s Hospital, we began to realize what a special group of caring, loving people these folks were. In addition, we began to realize just how many families like ours were impacted by tragic childhood illness here in the Birmingham area. MK suffered another setback in October when an “auto-immune” problem caused her to lose the use of her left arm and leg, basically rendering her a quadriplegic. Additional and more extensive therapy has allowed her to regain some movement and today she can walk with assistance and has limited use of her left hand and arm.

Throughout our entire ordeal, the members of the Greater Birmingham Association of Home Builders stood by me and my family as if we had been working with them for several years, not just a few days, weeks and eventually months and we quickly began to think of them as friends and family, not as “members” of the association.

When it came time for this year’s Parade of Homes, our association’s largest annual event and the largest Parade of Homes in Alabama, it was everyone’s desire to try and give back something from the association to those people in UAB’s Division of Pediatric Rehabilitation Medicine at Children’s Hospital that not only helped my daughter, but help so many other families as well.

For this reason we decided to hold a contest and allow Children’s Hospital rehabilitation patients to draw their “Dream Home.” While all of these drawings were excellent, we had to make the difficult decision of choosing one for the cover of this year’s Parade of Homes plan book.

I hope you are as impressed with the winner as I am. I think you’ll be even more impressed when you read Anna’s story.

I invite each of you to visit our web-site, www.birminghambuilder.com, to see all of the drawings from our contest. You can learn more about rehabilitation services at Children’s Hospital at www.rehab.chys.org. I encourage you to support Children’s Hospital in whatever way possible.

Enjoy this year’s Parade!

Pediatric Rehabilitation Information (.pdf format)