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Buckley Golf Tournament
March 19, 2008 |
After being born a few months early Piper weighed in at a mere 3.9 pounds. She
was small enough to fit in the palm of her father’s hand. Her mother Heather
says, “We weren’t able to hold her until four days after she was actually born
and that was really hard. It was hard to leave the hospital without our baby in
our hands.”
But Heather and Tom Buckley took comfort knowing that tiny Piper was in very caring hands at the Neo-Natal Intensive Care Unit at The Children’s
Hospital of Southwest Florida. “We’re fortunate because their success rate is
the highest in the state. Now if we lived in another town Piper probably would
have had to have been airlifted and then we would have to commute back and
forth. So we couldn’t have been luckier to have been here,” says Heather.
Now 15 months and more than 20 pounds later Piper serves as a star example of
the NICU’s success. “I think the doctor’s go without saying because she’s here
today but I’d like to say thank you to the nursing staff they were fantastic to
us,” says Tom.
Piper and the hundreds of other preemies out there were the focus of a celebrity
golf tournament in Fort Myers. Dozens of golfers, including a handful of Boston
Red Sox players teed off to help raise money for the NICU. “The money will
definitely help. It’s to add six new beds because it is at times overcrowded in
the NICU and so all that’s going to do is give more babies a fighting chance for
survival,” says Heather.
At least 500 babies from all over the state of Florida are admitted to
Children’s Hospital NICU each year. This is the 15th year the Boston Red Sox
have been involved with the Children’s Hospital Celebrity Golf Classic. Last
year the events raised more than $500,000 for the NICU. |
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