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<\/p>\nSometimes motherhood finds you in surprising ways. That\u2019s the lesson many people are learning from the story of a nurse in Brighton, Massachusetts, who adopted her daughter after the premature baby was under the care of her hospital for five months without a single visitor. Gisele is the light of Liz Smith\u2019s life, and the devoted mom is sharing their unique and heartwarming adoption story with the world.Smith first saw her daughter\u2019s bright blue eyes in 2016, when Gisele was being treated at her hospital for neonatal abstinence syndrome.<\/p>\n
As reported by Boston.com, Smith \u2014 then director of nursing at Franciscan Children\u2019s hospital in Brighton \u2014 was walking to the elevator at work when she spotted an 8-month-old girl with blue eyes and a brown curl framing her face.
\n\u201cWho\u2019s this beautiful angel?\u201d she recalled asking a nurse who was wheeling the girl down the hall, according Boston.com. \u201cHer name is Gisele,\u201d the nurse replied.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Gisele had come to Franciscan Children\u2019s five months before and had remained there. She was a ward of the state who had been born premature at a different hospital in July 2016 at 1 lb. and 14 oz. She was suffering from neonatal abstinence syndrome, a condition in which infants must withdraw from certain drugs they were exposed to before birth, such as opioids like heroin or other prescription drugs.<\/p>\n
The state had removed Gisele from her mother\u2019s care when she was 3 months old and moved her to the NICU at Franciscan Children\u2019s hospital because her lungs needed specialized treatment.
\nShe also had developed an oral aversion, a common occurrence in babies who have never experienced pleasure from eating, that made her reluctant to eat. At Smith\u2019s hospital, she was placed on a gastronomy tube to help feed her, and although she was starting to get better, she was falling behind on developmental milestones.
\n\u201cFranciscan was providing excellent care,\u201d Smith explained, \u201cbut she had just never been outside the hospital.\u201d
\nGisele was going to need a foster family quickly if she was ever going to get back on track with her development, but in the five months she had been in the hospital, not a single visitor stopped by to see the baby girl. Her social service workers had been trying, without success, to place her in foster care.<\/p>\n
\u201cGisele,\u201d Smith told herself as she drove home. \u201cI\u2019m going to foster this baby. I\u2019m going to be her mother.\u201dSmith had always known she wanted to be a mom, but her life had simply not found its way to parenthood yet.
\nSmith told the Boston Globe that it was her mother who first inspired her professionally and then personally for how she would eventually have kids. \u201cMy mom was a pediatric nurse who always put others first,\u201d she said. \u201cSo I grew up wanting to be a nurse, too.\u201d
\nBut after her mother died from liver cancer when Smith was 19 years old, she said she knew she wanted to honor her mother\u2019s memory by living a selfless life.
\nAs Smith entered her 40s, she began to wonder when her family life would begin.
\n\u201cMy definition of family was always: In my 20s I\u2019ll get married, have kids, and have a big family like the one I grew up with,\u201d she explained to the Boston Globe. \u201cI think a lot of women can relate to the pressure that we feel that there\u2019s an order to do things.\u201d
\nShe decided to try to get pregnant on her own and attempted several rounds of IUI, which didn\u2019t work. She also was devastated to find out she couldn\u2019t try in vitro fertilization; her lab results had changed and that disqualified her for IVF, so her insurance company wouldn\u2019t approve the procedure.
\n\u201cI never imagined becoming a mom would be a challenge,\u201d she said, according to Boston.com. \u201cIt\u2019s a desire you can try to push away and fill with other distractions, but it never goes away.\u201d
\nBut when she saw Gisele, she immediately knew there was a connection.
\n\u201cSince the moment I met her, there was something behind her striking blue eyes capturing my attention,\u201d she said. \u201cI felt that I needed to love this child and keep her safe.\u201dOnce Smith made up her mind, she spared no time in making her intentions official.
\nSmith quickly put in a request to foster the baby girl, and as she waited for the paperwork to process, she would visit her every day after work. She would speak softly to Gisele and sit next to her crib so she\u2019d no longer feel alone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sometimes motherhood finds you in surprising ways. That\u2019s the lesson many people are learning from the story of a nurse in Brighton, Massachusetts, who adopted her daughter… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":814,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ourtimenew.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ourtimenew.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ourtimenew.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ourtimenew.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ourtimenew.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=813"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ourtimenew.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":815,"href":"https:\/\/ourtimenew.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813\/revisions\/815"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ourtimenew.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ourtimenew.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ourtimenew.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ourtimenew.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}