San Francisco is for us a place of pathos - a place which holds both good memories and great sadness. Fifteen years ago, Twylla and I came to Palo Alto and Stanford University. Our first daughter Mariah had a serious heart problem. If it was surgically repaired before birth, she would have a chance to live. If not; she would die at birth. While fetal surgery for spina bifida has become quite common, no one had ever performed open heart surgery on a fetus before. The children's hospital at Stanford University put together a team of specialisists and professors of medicine from Stanford, Berkeley and UCLA who collectively believed that a fetal heart surgery could repair Mariah's heart valve, allowing her lungs to grow prior to birth and giving her a chance at life.
The world's first in utero open heart surgery was performed - our unborn daughter was placed on a heart lung bypass machine and the valve was repaired. However, her pulmonary artery was atrophied (no forward blood flow due to valve issue) and after this was corrected her heart was too weak to start beating again following the surgery.
Twylla and I spent 6 weeks in the Bay Area at that time. We traveled locally a bit - and the beauty of the area - particularly Monterey Bay and the Muir woods provided us some comfort.
For this reason, San Francisco is important to us, and we planned to revisit some of the special places.
Here are some pictures of our time in the San Francisco area:
Joshua tree - on our drive through the Mojave Desert from Vegas
Stanford University
Still the same "Giraffe Tree" as 15 years ago
Sea Lions at Monterey Bay
The Muir Woods
Lombard Street, Steep Hills and the Cable Cars of San Fransisco
The Jelly Belly Factory
Our Campsite at Pacifica
No comments:
Post a Comment