Cross-country road trips can be a great way to spend some quality time with your loved ones. For Aaliyah and her family, there is a very special reason behind their summer journey. On June 29, 2018, Aaliyah and her parents, Nur and Reiko, arrived in El Paso, Texas after making the drive from Phoenix, Arizona with a specific mission in mind; to thank the team who saved her life 10 years earlier.

“We were here during late December 2008,” wrote Nur, “we were a military family stationed in Holloman Air Force Base, NM and I had recently returned from a deployment when my daughter Aaliyah became extremely sick….the local hospital in Alamogordo took x-rays where it showed my daughter was almost completely congested and had serious pneumonia!”

As any parent would, Nur and Reiko were concerned when they found out their child’s diagnoses was too severe to be treated at their local hospital. Though they were nervous about their daughter’s health, they put their trust in the hands of our Pediatric Specialty Transport Team.

“They ended up transporting her by ambulance to your facility and over the course of about 2.5 weeks, your excellent staff performed breathing treatments around the clock, like clockwork and nursed her back to health” stated Nur.

Now that 10 years have passed and their precious Aaliyah is healthy and thriving, her family decided to make the almost 7 hour trek with flowers and a thoughtful card in hand to have a very special visit to Providence Children’s Hospital. Our team was overjoyed to be reunited with the little girl they had cared for in the PICU all those years ago.  

Nur left our team with an emotional expression of his family’s gratitude, stating “the scariest thing parents can hear is a doctor telling them he is not sure their child will live but you calmed that fear.”