[protected-iframe id=”15e9b5bb059547df999bf455bcd6676b-60970621-23417596″ info=”https://abc7.com/video/embed/?pid=549155″ width=”620″ height=”351″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen=””]
Remember when you were a little kid, and your parents used to yell at you for running around? “You’ll trip and fall,” they said. “You’ll end up breaking something,” they said. These parental warnings, which were never understood beyond the incomprehensible adult-speak of Charlie Brown, mostly referred to broken bones. But what about kidneys?
That’s precisely what happened to 7-year-old Sophia Angelini, who was rushed to to the hospital after she tripped on her shoelace, fell onto a curb, and broke her kidney. In precisely that order. According to ABC 7:
“When we saw the CT scan, we were pretty floored. We didn’t even know that was possible, that you could break a piece of your kidney off,” Sophia’s mother, Sara Angelini said.
But it happened to Sophia and something needed to be done to save her kidney. Dr. Hsi-Yang Wu performed the endoscopic surgery.
“We put a little plastic stent, a tube between the kidney and the bladder. The purpose is to let the urine go from the kidney out into the bladder, rather than sitting around the kidney,” Dr. Wu said.
Sounds yummy. What happened to little Sophia’s kidney, the pain it caused her, and the resulting surgery were all understood by the adults involved. But what about the kid in question?
“We drew her a picture of a happy kidney on one side, with a smiley face, and a sad kidney on the other. We told her, this is the kidney that got hurt, but he’s going to get better in a couple weeks, and his sad face will turn happy,” Sophia’s father Dominic Angelini said.
The Angelini family didn’t provide a copy of the drawing to ABC 7, so I cobbled something together. I call it “Success Kidney”:
Luckily for Sophia, the surgery was a success and — as of yesterday — she was almost cleared to go home.
(Via ABC 7)