My “arrival” at Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City may not be as monumental as Astronaut Neil A. Armstrong announcing the lunar landing module’s touchdown on the moon to Houston mission control in 1969, and a Bombadier Challenger 604 LearJet may not be the Saturn V Rocket, but “holy longhorn,” you can’t tell my Mama or Grandma that!

Grandma was visiting me in my hospital room in Houston when Mama received the phone call she was praying for: “The medical flight team from Utah will be picking up Madeleine tomorrow morning at 11:00 am and flying the both of you to Salt Lake City.” May 19, 2023. Grandma and my brother Samuel flew home the same day but NOT in MY plane; they flew home on a standard Delta Airlines Jetliner. The inside of My Plane looks something like this (add a medical team, portable baby bed and Mama of course.) We touched down 6 hours before grandma and brother. Not as fast as the speed of sound, but “perty darn fast” for sure.

Grandma and my brother Samuel were visiting Mama in Houston and staying a few days with her at the McDonald House. On Wednesday, May 17th, they visited the NASA Space Center because Grandma is “goo-goo” and “ga-ga” about everything NASA. Everything was super cool and super awesome. With the announcement of my flight plans, Grandma shares this quotation from Sally Ride, the first American female astronaut, “THE STARS DON’T LOOK BIGGER, BUT THEY DO LOOK BRIGHTER.”

A BIG THANK-YOU to the Director of Utah Medicaid for approving this service, to the people who coordinated every detail of this journey, thank-you to the Intermountain Life Flight Team- Utah’s leading air ambulance service, to the inflight highly skilled neonatal nurses, to the ambulance EMTs,  to Children’s Primary Hospital for accepting me as their newest NICU patient, to everyone praying for my safe “delivery” and, to what I like to think of as, my new “Sea of Tranquility.”

For more excitement, click on my newest page titled, “First things First.”