| Katherine Mei Mills |
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In April of 2006, Amy and I decided to adopt from China after I went to an EAC presentation in Denver. We were madly filling out the forms and paying the fees…at some point we were surfing the internet and Amy came across some information on special needs children. These needs ranged from severe to not-so-severe. We talked it over and decided that we could parent a child with cleft lip/palate, or possibly a curable heart defect, or something similar. We have to other children, and so we decided not to adopt a child with a communicable disease.
In what seemed like no time at all, we were asked if we would consider a 22-month-old girl with an already-repaired diaphragm hernia, which her stomach had pushed through. At about six months old she had surgery to repair the hernia and put her stomach back in place, and all was apparently successful. We had the translated medical reports, which took about six pages to say what I wrote here, along with all of the standard tests. We sent the reports to a doctor, bu even before we talked to him we accepted the referral, and in February of 2007, we went to China to pick up our new daughter, Katherine Mei (of course, Uncle Zhou is amazing, but that’s another story).
It’s been four months now. Her stomach certainly works fine now (NOT a finicky eater), and the only evidence of her special needs status is a scar on her abdomen and one under her arm from the surgery. She has been thoroughly checked by our pediatrician, and all is well, with no expectations of anything in the future. She plays with her brothers (one two years older and one six weeks younger) and causes two-year-old trouble all day. She is happy, attention-hungry, playground loving little girl. She is picking up English at an incredible pace (she learned “yes” from her older brother, and “no” from the other two-year old), and no issue has come of the special needs adoption.
Go Back to China Special Needs Front Page |
