Tell Me Something Good 1/19/20

Tell Me Something Good logo. Image by Lenny Ghoul and Word Clouds.

The news these days is often depressing at worst and frustrating at best. It’s easy to get caught up in the spin cycle and let it get us down. Never fear… The News Blender has you covered. Once a week we feature Something Good and, in return, all you have to do is tell us something good that has happened to you this week, something you are thankful for, a joke, a cute animal story, an inspiring tale of heroics, a Random Act of Kindness… SOMETHING good.

Today’s something good is a pediatric surgeon who takes a little extra time to make his patients’ recovery brighter.

Dr. Robert Parry has worked at Akron Children’s Hospital since 2011 and performed about 10,000 surgeries. For each of those, he has provided custom artwork on the child’s surgical dressings. His trademark illustrations were celebrated in a roundup of the hospital’s top ten moments of the decade.

When Christina Potts Whipkey’s seven year-old daughter Kennedy had surgery, Dr. Parry drew a butterfly on her dressing. Whipkey told CNN, “There is an incredible amount of stress any time a child is ill. When there is a surgical schedule, parents work hard to hide their fear of the procedure, the financial stress of the situation, and their terror of something going wrong.” Waking up from her surgery, Kennedy wasn’t concerned about her scar and was excited to see the butterfly on her dressing.

For 11 month-old Rose, who had surgery in 2014, the surgeon drew a rose garden. Samantha, her mother, says it showed how much Dr. Parry cared and lifted their spirits after Rose’s diagnosis of liver disease.

The self-taught artist says each piece of artwork takes about five minutes to complete. Sports team logos and Disney characters are his most frequently requested artwork, but he will go out of his way to make any drawing requested. He told CNN, “It’s been a pretty special thing, for everyone. It’s fun for me to do, the parents and the children really enjoy it and even the whole medical staff likes to get in on it. Whenever one of my kids arrive in the recovery room, the nurses all like to take a look to see what dressing the child got. I think it just makes everyone, me included, feel good.”

Any parent who has had a child go through surgery can appreciate a surgeon giving his young patients and their families something to smile about.

Now it’s your turn… Tell me something good!

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