An 'angel' finds faith amid struggles

The day after Christmas.

Hitting the outlets, picking over cold turkey, grumbling about gifts.

But not for the Green-Edmundson family and their 8-year-old daughter, Brooklyn. Monday was a flight to Baltimore to meet with a specialist Tuesday to decide when exactly she is to have her legs dislocated and a partial hip replacement.

For many, going through what Brooklyn has had to endure so far in her short life — chronic rheumatoid arthritis, 13 operations before she was 5, including three on her mouth for a cleft palate and eight on her severely clubbed feet — might lead them to curse the heavens.

Yet Brooklyn yearns for the divine. "Do you know guys," she tells her bemused friends, "there's this really cool place that's free where you can go and learn about God?"

But in November, when one of her team of surgeons at the Shriners Hospital for Children said she'd have to have the tops of her femurs cut off and her legs rotated or she could face paralysis, Brooklyn asked her mother, "Why doesn't God love me?"

Her parents, Malinda and Harold, are devoted to Brooklyn's medical team at Shriners. "They truly want to help children," Malinda said. "It's been wonderful to have them in our lives." But the enormity of the operation they are recommending left them no choice. They decided to seek a second opinion.

"I want to make sure this absolutely has to be done now," Malinda said. Three percent of children with diastrophic dysphasia, a form of dwarfism, have to have hip-replacement surgery. "But it's not even on the charts for a child Brooklyn's age," she said.

Malinda wrote a seven-page, tear-stained letter to Dr. Michael Ain, pediatric orthopedic surgeon at Johns Hopkins Children Center in Baltimore. She told him how Brooklyn was born without the roof of her mouth — if she opened her mouth, you could see into her nasal cavity — a recessed chin, an ulna deviation that meant her hands were constantly raised upwards and club feet. Nine months after birth, she then developed a 47-degree curvature of the spine that required her to wear a thoracic brace for three years. The chin, arms and spine were resolved non-surgically; her feet, however, show the scars of the surgeon's knife. She refuses to wear skirts because she thinks her legs are "gross."

The appointment with Ain brought both good and bad news.