Parent Advocate:

GABRIELLE MCDOWELL, mom to 5-year-old heart transplant patient, Harrison

SUPERPOWER:

My intuition. A mother knows when her child is not ok.

Gabrielle climbed into her son’s hospital bed, stroking his curly blonde hair that she’d trimmed herself earlier that day.

She held him close as they began to drift to sleep, amid beeping monitors and dozens of stuffed dinosaurs (Harrison’s favorite!), including an oversized T-Rex tucked by his side.

Day No. 64 at Children’s Health℠.

“I’m so proud of you, Harrison,” she told her son, as his eyes fought to stay open.

“I’m proud of you, too, mommy,” he replied.

Gabrielle reached for her phone and typed a quick post to update friends and family.

“This boy melts me every day,” she wrote of her son who loves to wiggle his eyebrows up and down and roar like a dinosaur. “I’d live in this hospital until the end of time to keep him if I had to.”

Because as she typed this, Harrison’s heart was failing.

When Harrison and Gabrielle left their home for an appointment at Children’s Medical Center Dallas in January 2020, Gabrielle packed an overnight bag. She suspected her son was in heart failure and that they wouldn’t be coming home that night.

And she braced herself for news she’d spent the last two years anticipating since Harrison received his cardiomyopathy diagnosis: He would need a new heart.

Harrison has been under the care of our team members since 2018, when his parents, Gabrielle and Bobby, relocated from their home in North Carolina to Dallas for Harrison to be treated at The Heart Center.

In April 2020 — two days after the two-year anniversary of Harrison’s cardiomyopathy diagnosis — Harrison was placed on the heart transplant list.

About a week later, Gabrielle received the call that Harrison’s new heart was here.

“We’ve never doubted for a second that we made the right decision coming to Children’s Health. We’re really comfortable here,” Gabrielle said.