Malta Shrine Club visits Spokane Children's Hospital

Malta Shrine Club trip to Spokane Shriners Hospital for Children, February 18-21, 2016

It was 1:25 p.m. on Thursday, February 18 when Nobles of the Malta Shrine Club and their ladies boarded the train in Malta and headed to the Spokane Shriners Hospital for Children.

For two days, the Malta Shriners and ladies toured this amazing facility of miracles from top to bottom. They were treated like royalty as the head of virtually every department enthusiastically and with marked emphasis described how their specific department was the most important and most significant to the function and success of the hospital. The pride and enthusiasm of each staff member was infectious.

The head surgeon described how they changed limbs and lives with scalpels, screws and braces, while the prosthetics department described how they shaped lives and limbs with plaster, plastic and steel. The laundry/ janitorial department described with gusto how the entire facility was dependent upon them for clean, sanitary and germ-free sheets, floors and rooms. Even under the bottom of it all, the boiler room man in the basement proudly showed how, for the past twenty-five years he has serviced the heating and cooling systems as well as provided the massive amounts of steam needed for sterilization and power for many of the hospital's systems.

Then we met one of the stars of the show; a seven-year-old boy with a heart bigger than all creation, a smile as wide as the horizon, and a personality that can out shine the sun. And he had no legs. Born with deformed legs, he had never walked a step in his life; Until he came to the Spokane Shriners Hospital for Children. There they found that his legs could not be salvaged and they were removed. And there, within the past five months he has been fitted with progressively more sophisticated prostheses, and he now proudly showed us how, just a few short days before we arrived, he could walk. Real, mechanical knee joints. Real, for sure real tennis shoes, and real steps. And there were a few real lumps in the throats and a few real tears on some of the cheeks of our Shriners and ladies.

The hospital is already fabricating running blades for him.

The Nobles and Ladies of the Malta Shrine Club came home Sunday; humbled, grateful, proud, and so very thankful for the incredibly talented, dedicated staff members at the Spokane SHC, and at all of the twenty two Shriners Hospitals across North America, Canada and Mexico, that make such miracles happen on a daily basis. And we so very much appreciate and thank the communities of Phillips County for the support that makes it all these miracles possible for the children.