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Alison Boyd

Eloquence escapes me when I talk or write about my late daughter Alison Elizabeth Boyd, or “Ali” as we called her.  I wish I could convey to you what a joy she was…how captivating her smile…how contagious her laughter.  Believe me, you have missed something special if you missed meeting and knowing Alison Boyd

Ali was born on April 14, 1987, the day following my 38th birthday.  My wife Denise had carried her and her twin sister almost fullterm before a scheduled C-section delivery.  While Denise was pregnant with these babies, I had been discharged from active duty in the United States Army.  In the military, the soldier and his family get excellent medical care…but once the soldier is separated, all that medical coverage disappears.

Since I did not yet have a job in the civilian world, my pregnant wife qualified for a prenatal program under welfare.  It’s not something I am proud of, but it was a necessity at the time.  The doctor immediately took an ultrasound picture, which revealed that we were going to be parents of twins.

Two weeks before the scheduled C-section, my (then) wife Denise told the doctor that something was wrong because one of the babies had stopped moving.  The doctor never took any action.  Standards of medical practice dictated that she conduct another ultrasound, but she thought the welfare program only paid for one…and she already had taken that one.  When lawyers asked her why she didn’t tell us we needed to have another one, her response was that Longview, TX (near where we lived at the time) was a small town and “we do things differently out here”.  She assumed that we could not afford to pay for an ultrasound, so she never suggested it.

Later we learned that Alysa had died within the womb.  For at least two weeks, Alison shared her space with a corpse.  Her white cell count was exceptionally high, and her red cell count was down dramatically, thus limiting the amount of oxygen that could get to her body.  As a result of the doctor’s inaction, Alison suffered extensive brain damage before birth.  In the delivery room, Ali was the first one born, and she was a sick baby.  She had no heartbeat and no respiration.  Doctors called in a special team from Shumpert Medical Center in Shreveport, LA, who flew in and worked on Alison for several hours before they felt comfortable enough to put her on a helicopter and fly her to their neonatal intensive care unit.  Even then, they expressed their doubts that she would survive.  The team leader told me not to rush the hours drive to Shreveport because she seriously doubted Ali would survive the flight.

When I got to the hospital in Shreveport about 2 hours later, Ali was still alive but not expected to live.  Doctors and nurses gave her less than a 50-50 chance to live.  She was on oxygen and had several tubes in various orifices and arteries.  Our friends at church began praying fervently and believing that she would be healed.  Miraculously, by the next morning, Ali had surprised the medical team by surviving.  The prayers of the faithful had been heard and answered.

They sent Alison home with us with the warning that they doubted she would live beyond the age of 3 years.

For the first several months after Ali was released from the hospital, she seemed like most other babies.  By the time she was about five months old, though, Denise realized that Alison was not developing normally

She took Alison back to the doctors in Shreveport, where they discovered massive brain damage and that Alison also was blind.  Of course, we were devastated!  We had no choice but to continue to love her and to take the best care of her that we could.  Her mother took on the task with a strength of character that surprised me.

About a year after Alison was born, she developed a seizure disorder.  Those seizures were severe enough that it took massive doses of different kinds of sedatives to bring them under control.  The doctors warned that every time Ali had a seizure, she suffered more brain damage.  Denise sought out medical equipment that would alert us during the night if Alison had a seizure.  We demanded sedatives and oxygen bottles so that we could administer first aid to Ali while waiting for the ambulance to arrive.  We had to demand these things because the doctors assumed that we would be irresponsible in our use of those devices.  Our attitude was that if we could intervene as soon as Alison began seizing, maybe we would limit the brain damage she would suffer.  We watched a child who went from being able to speak short sentences like “I’m a good girl” to  not being able to speak any intelligible word.

Denise worked to become fully knowledgeable about Alison’s condition.  She discovered medical assistance programs that helped us fully recognize Ali’s problems and hopefully to learn how to help her develop as much as possible.  Denise became an advocate for children like Alison, often helping other mothers who had children with similar medical challenges.  Together, we lobbied the school systems and even went to the governor’s office in Baton Rouge, LA, (we had moved to LA because of my job).  We faced a school system that did not want to offer Alison legally required classes during the summertime the first year we were there.  The superintendent denied our requests and even attempted to suppress my appeal to the school board.  After I threatened to bring in the news media, we made our appeal, only to have the teacher’s union oppose us.  We had to fight the system, but were able to prevail for the most part.  Alison received occupational therapy, physical therapy and speech therapy.

Throughout her life, Alison had a variety of caring teachers and therapists.  Most rewarding was her last teacher, a woman in Spring Hill, TX.  I have forgotten her name, but I remember that she thought Alison was a human being with wants and desires and thoughts all her own.  That teacher had faith in Alison when her speech therapists, physical therapists, and occupational therapists thought they were wasting their time with Ali.  She saw Alison as we, her family, saw her:  a beautiful loving child with a smile so alluring that you could never NOT smile with her.

In my next blog, I will show you photos of Alison as she played and as she smiled.  I will share the thoughts and memories of our sweet Alison from her mother, a brother, sister, grandmother and niece.  You will find them moving and bittersweet.  Rest assured that Alison Elizabeth Boyd will not be forgotten so long as any of us live.  My hope is that, through these blogs, you will remember her as well.