Stranger approaches couple in theme park to make unusual comment about their baby — it saved the kid's life
More often than not, people might feel wary of strangers coming up to them and talking. Especially if they are with their kids. But a mom was grateful to a stranger who wanted to talk to her about her baby because his intervention ended up saving her son's life. The mom, Sarah Love was visiting a theme park near her house in Florida along with her husband and their six-week-old baby, Lincoln. The baby's five other siblings were also there when a stranger noticed the baby and came up to the parents to comment on his appearance, as per Good Morning America.
The mom had noticed that a man was looking at her newborn baby but decided to brush it off until the man ran into them again later that day and stopped her to talk. "He introduced himself and mentioned that he was a first responder. He said he noticed Lincoln and how very jaundiced he was and he didn't want to scare us... but he just thought it might be a good idea for Lincoln to get some medical attention," Love told the outlet. The man was a firefighter in a nearby county and wanted to draw the mom's attention to what he saw.
The woman didn't really feel scared about the comment because she had noticed those symptoms herself and the stranger was very collected when he pointed it out. Earlier, a pediatrician had told the woman that there was nothing to worry about. "Ever since [Lincoln] was born, he's been jaundiced. At his baby well visit, his pediatrician didn't seem concerned at all. She gave us counsel to stick him in the sunlight, hopefully, and it would clear up and there were some other things with him that we noticed." So when the firefighter told her about what he had noticed, Love decided to contact her son's pediatrician again and get him checked once more. She was told to take her baby to the hospital to get some bloodwork done.
The boy came into the hospital and was put on IV fluids as the doctors did his bloodwork to identify the cause behind his symptoms. They eventually told her that the baby should go to a specialty children's hospital in Orlando called Nemours. The family went through a long process of additional testing and a liver biopsy before the doctors figured out what had exactly happened. They discovered that the baby had Alagille syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects the liver and heart. The parents were quite shocked as their previous five children had been healthy.
"It felt like the carpet had been ripped up from underneath us. There were some very intense feelings going through all of this, very scared, very unsure. I was very grateful for the wonderful doctors that we had, but I don't think there's anything you can say to try and comfort a parent in that situation," the mom expressed. She appreciated the comment she got at the park as it pushed her to get her baby checked. "It was that extra added bit of encouragement that we needed." The woman highlighted that she didn't have words to describe how thankful she was.