Jeffrey M. Hendricks

Jeff Hendricks calls it the day the earth opened up, the day of his daughter’s birth. She arrived 14 weeks premature. She weighed less than four pounds, half of that a tumor. He has decided she deserves a bit of spoiling, given how hard her life was at first.

Halfway through her pregnancy, his wife began having contractions. The doctors at the hospital tried to stop the contractions and finally decided to do a C-section. During the delivery, Jeff recalls something like 40 people in the room, and not one of them congratulated him. “Everyone thought she was a goner.” Soon after being born, his daughter was sent to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center for surgery. The kind of tumor she had occurs once in maybe 35,000 births. more