An Important Donation Celebrates Adam's Life

In April 2020, Erin jumped at the chance to give back when our hospital was in short supply of a disinfectant during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2008, her one-day-old son Adam arrived at our neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Our team performed life-saving surgery within 24 hours, and he spent a month recovering in our NICU and has had several follow-up surgeries in the following years.

Today, Adam is 13 and healthy. “He’s a very kind, thoughtful person, probably because he experienced so many fights throughout his life,” Erin says. She describes care providers at Children’s National Hospital over the years much the same way. “They took care of us all during a very difficult time,” she says, “in addition to saving our child’s life.”

Erin works for a commercial janitorial company. When she heard about our hospital’s shortage of a critical cleaning supply, Oxivir, she asked her employer about a donation. A distributor came through with a discounted supply. Her company offered it to Children’s National at no cost. She made the delivery on the eighth anniversary of Adam’s last surgery. “I’m so grateful I got to celebrate everything Adam’s team did to give him a healthy life by delivering this small donation to the warehouse,” Erin says. “When I dropped it off, everyone cheered.”