They thought they didn’t want a child who needed a heart transplant. They were wrong.
Angie and Jerry Guy had made the decision to adopt, settled on China as the country they were most interested in working with, and were weighing the adoption agency’s recommendation to declare themselves as being open to a child with special needs.
That’s because — as countless adoptive parents before them have learned — the process of getting a child with an identified special medical or developmental condition is easier and takes much less time than the process to get a child without any special needs. Often years less.
The Gastonia couple didn’t want to wait years. They already had an 8-year-old and a 12-year-old at home. So they took the recommendation.
Then came the awkward part.
“We had to go through these forms that ask, ‘What special needs are you willing to take?’” Angie Guy recalls. “Well, China defines special needs as a lot of things that aren’t really that critical. Like, if you have a big birthmark, you’re considered special needs. My (biological) son’s allergic to all nuts; that would be considered special needs. We said, ‘OK, we can handle some of those minor things.’ Minor being the operative word there.”
“That,” Jerry says, “was one of the most difficult things, because you’re sitting there going, ‘That we like, but no, not that.’”
There was also an option to put certain special needs in a maybe column, and among the select few they included was “minor heart defect.”
“But we did not want to get a critically ill child,” Angie says, matter-of-factly. “We didn’t think we could do Down Syndrome. We didn’t think we could do cerebral palsy. ...
“And I would have never signed up to take a child that was gonna need a heart transplant one day.”
This all happened about a decade ago, and within a year, in May 2012, the Guys adopted a 2-year-old girl from China named Sarah who was originally listed as having a minor heart defect. It turned out to be very, very major.
Last month, she underwent successful heart-transplant surgery.
Now, as Angie and Jerry Guy reflect on that day they filled out those forms — on those two people who were just skating along, enjoying a “normal” life, basing their choices in a way they hoped would preserve their “normal” life — they are able to fully appreciate how much their values and perspectives have shifted.
And they can say with absolute certainty that they’ve never regretted adopting a child with a major medical condition. Not once.
In fact, if they had to, they would do it a thousand times again.
The decision to adopt
The Guys did indeed have a comfortable life.
Angie was working as a senior vice president at Bank of America. Jerry was preparing to start work on a master’s degree in counseling psychology at Liberty University. Angie’s son from a previous marriage — Mitchell, who was 2 when his mom remarried — was 12 and active in basketball. Allie, 8, the Guys’ biological daughter, played competitive soccer.
Then one night during Bible study at their church, Flint Groves Baptist in Gastonia, Angie had a bit of an epiphany.
“We were reading this book ‘Outlive Your Life,’ by Max Lucado,” she recalls, “and in the first or second chapter he was saying how you will never solve world hunger, how God doesn’t call you to solve the orphan crisis, how you’re never gonna end wars. Not as an individual. But he was saying you are called to do something. What is your something? If you’ve been blessed with a family and a home and financial stability, what are you doing with it? And it really, really challenged me.
“It was like, Yeah, I’m not really doing anything.”
She knew one couple in the Bible study group had adopted a child, and that another had been foster parents. She was struck by the idea that taking in a child might be her and Jerry’s calling, too.
Jerry, at first, disagreed.
“It was such an overwhelming concept,” he recalls. “I’m like, everything we have is golden right now, so why do we want to mess with anything else? And then financially, that impact was daunting.”
“I’m sitting there going, ‘But we’re almost done.’”
It didn’t deter Angie. She asked her husband to pray about it, and continued to do research and seek out information about adopting. She even signed up for an adoption education course. But on the day of the class, Angie decided not to go. When Jerry asked why she changed her mind, she told him, “Look, it’s not something I can do by myself. We’ve got to be together on this.”
He hadn’t prayed about it before, but he finally got on it.
And as he did, it finally became clear: “We have a chance,” Jerry remembers realizing, “to change somebody’s life.”
It’s just that, again, they were initially hesitant to change their own lives too much. But it all happened so fast.
‘We’re just gonna trust you’
They had just 48 hours to make a decision.
The little girl was listed as having a minor heart defect, and another couple had just passed on an offer to adopt her because they consulted doctors who noted inconsistencies in her medical records.
With the clock ticking, the Guys made a quick connection with a Charlotte cardiologist who made a similar assessment from the girl’s files. In the best-case scenario, he told them, it’s one surgery, which has a 99% success rate; in the worst-case scenario, it’s a congenital heart defect that she’ll have to deal with for the rest of her life.
After talking it over and praying about it, they found the answer to be obvious: “We said, ‘God, we feel like you sent us this file for a reason,’” Angie recalls. “‘While we’re a little scared ... we’re just gonna trust you. If this is the child you sent us, then this is the child we’re gonna take.’
“So we accepted her.”
It really was that simple, they say. The switch really did flip for them that quickly and that dramatically.
Even after finding out that their new daughter did in fact have a serious congenital heart defect, and that at some unknown point later in life she would need to get a transplant, they never questioned their choices. They never looked back. They were all-in with Sarah.
And when just a few months after bringing Sarah home they learned about another orphaned child in China who needed help — one who was much, much sicker — Angie and Jerry did something they never could have imagined doing back when they were filling out that special-needs form.
They went all-in on him, too.
Welcoming a fourth child
While the Guys were going through the process of adopting Sarah, an organization called Love Without Boundaries had raised enough money to pay for her to have one of the corrective heart surgeries she needed in China. They politely declined. They wanted Sarah to have the surgery in the U.S.
So the funds were redirected to a baby boy who was just a few weeks old and also needed surgery to repair a serious heart condition.
His name was Braxton.
In the months that followed, he underwent his life-saving surgery, Sarah’s adoption was finalized, she had her surgery in Charlotte (which was a complete success), and Sarah and her new family acclimated to each other smoothly and with lots of joy.
But out of curiosity, Angie kept periodically checking in with her contact in China to see how Braxton was doing. In early 2013, a report came back that he was getting weaker, that his development was slowing, and that he had contracted pneumonia.
“What are they going to do with him?” Angie recalls asking. “Is he up for adoption? If so, I would love to advocate and try to help find him a forever home. I definitely don’t want him to not have someone.”
The response she received shocked her: He was not going to be put up for adoption, they said, because he probably won’t make it.
“That just — as Christians, as a compassionate mother, I never was able to really get over that,” she says. “And I told my husband one night, ‘I don’t feel comfortable just letting this little guy lay there and die. There was a reason he was brought into our life.’ So we went back and asked, ‘If we pursued adoption, would (he be made eligible)?’
“They said, ‘First of all, you’re crazy. Second of all, yeah, I mean, if y’all are willing to do it, you can adopt him.’”
Through an expedited process, Angie and Jerry brought their fourth child home to Gastonia in November 2013.
Braxton died on March 12, 2014, less than two months after his second birthday.
“So we had him for four months,” Angie says, “and he didn’t die alone in an orphanage. Not that they didn’t care. I know that they cared, and I know that they were doing the best they could. But here, he had a brother and a sister that loved him and he got to play, and he learned to do so many little things in those four months.”
“While I was very sad that he wasn’t able to live and grow up and be this amazing little guy, I would rather have gone through that pain and him know the love of a family.”
‘Is she ever not smiling?’
Meanwhile, there were still questions about Sarah’s health, too.
She had undergone a second open-heart surgery in 2013, and the cardiologist sat Angie and Jerry down for a conversation that didn’t definitively answer any of them.
“‘We just don’t know what’s going to happen, or when,’” they recall being told. “‘But don’t stress it.’”
So they didn’t. And Sarah flourished.
“She was absolutely perfect after her surgeries. She recovered great both times,” Angie recalls. “She ran, she played ... she never said, ‘I’m tired, my heart hurts, I feel funny.’ No issues. And she has always had a smile on her face. I mean, people have asked us, like, ‘Is she ever not smiling?’”
In elementary school, Sarah started doing gymnastics. By the time she was 9 she was on a competitive team at the First in Flight gym in Gastonia; before long, she was training eight hours a week.
Everything was fine until the middle of last year, when her regular six-month appointment revealed that her heart rate was unusually low. This set off a chain of tests and evaluations that raised growing concerns, culminating in Sarah having a pacemaker and defibrillator implanted in her chest this past December.
It didn’t hold off the inevitable for long.
On Jan. 18, Sarah collapsed while waiting with her older sister and her mother in line to check out at the American Girl store inside SouthPark mall and was rushed to the hospital. Three and a half weeks later — on Feb. 12, two days after she turned 11 years old and two days before the date millions celebrate by giving gifts and cards in the shape of a heart — Sarah received a new heart.
Within hours, she was up and smiling. Barely a week after the surgery, she was on a tricycle in the hallway on the eighth floor of Levine Children’s Hospital, racing her dad.
And winning.
What does the future hold?
Sarah is sitting on the outdoor sofa on the deck of the Guys’ home, wedged between her parents. She does indeed seem to have a smile plastered to her face, and if you give her an opening to talk, she’ll run with it.
“We did a scavenger hunt while we were at the beach,” Sarah says of the trip they just took to Myrtle Beach to celebrate one month out from her transplant and to observe the anniversary of Braxton’s passing. “And one of the things that me and Mom put on there was something fuzzy. Of course, they went to the laundry room thing —”
“Laundromat,” Jerry interjects, chuckling.
“Whatever,” Sarah says, before continuing. “— and they got lint as their fuzzy thing, while me, my sister and my mama, are scrambling around trying to find something fuzzy.”
She goes on and on, chattering and smiling and laughing and teasing her parents, fidgeting restlessly in her seat the whole time. When she finally finishes, Angie laugh and says: “Doesn’t seem like she had a transplant a month ago, does it?”
It really doesn’t. But she did, and though it’s given her a new lease on life, it’s a mystery as to what the terms of the lease will be.
That’s why Angie and Jerry, after repeatedly resisting offers from people who wanted to organize grassroots efforts to raise funds for the family’s medical bills, accepted help from the Children’s Organ Transplant Association.
The nonprofit convinced them that even though they had good health insurance and enough money to send their kids to private school, they needed to think about what could happen when Sarah ages out of their coverage. The anti-rejection medications are exorbitantly expensive; another heart transplant, which she very well could need in adulthood, would cost a fortune.
So, the money that COTA is helping to raise will be set aside for the future — and the Guys know as well as anyone that there are no guarantees.
“I would have never thought when we met, when we got married, that this would be our story,” Jerry says, shaking his head. “But man, it has been a wonderful story.”
It’s also one they hope will inspire others.
“We definitely are still selfish in plenty of ways,” Angie says, “so it’s not like we are better than anybody else. But I (hope our story shows) others that ... you are so much stronger than you think you are.”
Angie turns her head and looks down at Sarah — who is still fidgeting, and who is still grinning, and who is perhaps still alive today mainly because her parents decided to heed God’s call to open up their hearts — and she smiles.
“You think you can’t handle stuff,” Angie says, finally, “but when the time comes, you can handle it.”
To donate: Contributions may be sent to the Children’s Organ Transplant Association, 2501 West COTA Drive, Bloomington, Indiana, 47403. Checks should be made payable to COTA, with “In Honor of Team Sarah” written on the memo line. Secure credit card gifts are accepted online at www.COTAforTeamSarah.com.
This story was originally published March 19, 2021 at 3:45 PM.
