Pender Strong

Meet Pender Rose. She is a smart, happy, energetic 5 year old from Charlotte. On Feb 9th she attended a father daughter dance with her daddy. She came home early not feeling well and was soon diagnosed with the flu. By Valentine's day she was admitted to the hospital with pneumonia. It wasn't long after she was admitted to the hospital that her symptoms started getting worse. Her lung collapsed and her chest cavity began filling with all kinds of yuck. Her first surgery removed a full liter of fluid from her chest and more fluid drained out over the next few days. The doctors decided that maybe home sweet home is what she needed to recover.  They sent her home 2/28/2019 with the hope that her little body just needed to heal. On 3/5/19 an X-ray showed that she was worse off than was thought. Not only was her chest still filling up with fluid but her lung was still collapsed and her trachea and heart were being pushed to the side. Back to the hospital they went where they attempted to insert another tube to have the fluid drain and the lung reinflate. After a week the lung was still collapsed and so she underwent another surgery. They had to scrape out her chest cavity and insert tubes into her chest to manually inflate her lung. While they were doing that they had to suction off the dead pieces of lungs. She will have to stay in the hospital for at least another 2 weeks before we will know if her lung will heal. Pender has 3 siblings and two loving parents. Mom is a stay at home mom who cares for Pender and her two younger sisters 3 and 7 months as well as her older teenaged sister. Dad works full time but has used up all his sick and vacation time and is now on FMLA leave without pay. Throughout all of this Pender still smiles and jokes and is genuinely a happy soul. We are asking for any donations or prayers to help Pender's family so they can focus on helping her heal.