Moosey Moosey Moose

I can’t tell you how much fun I had, answering phones for two hours Thursday afternoon for the Radiothon at Primary Children’s Medical Center. First, you have to know how neat an opportunity that was for me. Doing what I do usually means that when something like this is going on, I’m working behind the scenes back at the station in some capacity. (Heck, when I worked in Louisville, I was back at the station even during the Kentucky Derby. Not exactly a day at the races!) But the schedule gave me a rare weekday off Thursday, so I asked if I could spend some time up at the hospital. I talked to a man whose daughter had open heart surgery when she was just 10 months old. She’s eight now – tallest kid in her class and doing fine. Another man called to tell me about his son’s traumatic head injury last fall, and how nice the people at PCMC were to his family during that ordeal. His son is all better, too. My favorite call came from a woman who wanted to know not just if she could donate a stuffed moose to a child – she wanted to know if there was a way to make that donation go to a specific child. If you heard my story earlier this week, you know that Ken Macey and his family are the people behind the moose. It’s just his way of helping the hospital have an incentive for people to donate. He happened to be standing nearby when I took that woman’s call. Normally, Macey and the hospital distribute the moose to all the children in the hospital later on, after the Radiothon itself is over, when they can hand them out all at once. So usually, they can’t designate a moose for a specific child, because during the Radiothon itself there’s no way to know which children will still be there on the day they hand out the moose. But Macey went out of his way to track down a spare moose to honor this woman’s wish – and not just give that moose to a child in the hospital, but to actually deliver it in person almost as soon as I’d hung up the phone.