WASHINGTON — Myleah Rhynes spent Christmas 2009 like many mothers across America—opening presents with her children. Myleah, however, was in the intensive care unit of Children’s Medical Center of Dallas.
The Providence Village, Texas, mother traveled to Washington this week to push Congress on how much federal support there should be for training pediatricians. Her story involves a Christmas Eve car crash two years ago in Oklahoma, during a blinding snowstorm with her son and two daughters, Morgen and Meadow, a local clinic that was not equipped to handle the girls’ severe injuries, and an 80-mile ambulance ride to the level 1 trauma care center in Dallas, where Myleah’s kids could get the care they needed.
“I was trying to reach over to my sister because I was talking to her, trying to get her, and then we were holding hands for a second and that made me happy,” said Meadow of the 12-hour ambulance ride to Dallas.
Myleah didn’t expect to be the kind of mother knocking on House and Senate doors. The near-death experience of her children, however, has changed her family’s mission, she said.
“Through this experience I’ve met…so many children who need specialized care,” Myleah said. “Without the funding, it just won’t happen.”
Myleah and her daughters are encouraging lawmakers to support continued funding for children’s hospitals, places like Children’s Hospital in Dallas, where they received care. Funding to children’s teaching hospitals is set to be cut completely from the 2012 budget when the program expires on September 30. Both the House and the Senate are currently looking at bills to reauthorize the funding and allow hospitals like Children’s in Dallas to continue providing pediatric care.
Children’s Medical Center has been talking with its Washington representatives about the importance of pediatric healthcare. The hospital is encouraging lawmakers to sign on to the bills for reauthorization in the House and Senate, said Teresa Huskey, senior director of government affairs at Children’s in Dallas.
The Rhynes family did some lobbying of their own during their time in Washington, sharing their story and photos of the wreck with nine congressional members from Texas and Oklahoma. Three Texas representatives have shown support by co-sponsoring the bill, including Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas, the representative from the Rhynes’ home district.
“Because the funding for children’s graduate medical education follows a different trajectory than that which can be funded directly and indirectly out of Medicare, it’s important to have this as a backstop for those funds,” said Burgess, who is also a doctor and did his residency at the hospital next to Children’s in the 1970s.
Without this funding, the access that Myleah’s daughters had to quality trauma care may have been limited.
“If it wouldn’t have been level 1, they wouldn’t have known what to do to take care of their massive injuries and they would not have survived,” Myleah said. “And not just my children, but many other children that go to Children’s every day, every year, they won’t have that specialized training.”
The Rhynes family continues to advocate for Children’s Medical Center, spreading the message of how important children’s healthcare is and participating in the Children’s Medical Center Holiday Parade as grand marshals in 2010.
The accident has also started a new Christmas tradition in their family.
“We went to the store and bought six presents each and delivered them,” Myleah said. “That’ll be a tradition even when they’re adults, I hope, that we’re still doing it. There’s a lot of meaning for us to do that.”