Tary Gerst holds the teddy bear Logan took with him to all of his doctor's appointments. Greg Beckner/Staff
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Loving Logan

A foster parent shares her personal story

by Anna B. Mitchell

Click here to read more medical neglect in South Carolina

Six nurses and a doctor were trying to find a vein to put a catheter into the baby.

His veins were shot, his foster mother Tari Gerst said, because he’d been in the hospital so many times. They tried to put the needle in a vein in his head.

“I’m right down where he’s looking at me, and I’m singing my song that I always sing. And he’s hurting and it’s so horrible. I told them it was time for a break. He’d lay his head in my neck and then pop his head up and smile. Everyone would be in tears.”

That’s the way Logan was, Gerst said. He smiled through the pain, a little gift to the doctors who tried, and failed, to save him.

That was seven years ago, and Logan was 18 months old when he lost his battle with heart and pulmonary failure.

Last year just under 1,000 children came under the protection of the South Carolina Department of Social Services because they were suffering from medical neglect. In Logan’s case, he had a grandmother who loved him but couldn’t handle his needs.

His story shows the level of care a handful of the 5,000 or so foster kids in South Carolina every year need. Many foster-care children have siblings who want to stay together, and 1,500 of them are on waiting lists right now for a home. Most are healthy, though they bear emotional scars from their experiences in broken homes. Logan’s story demonstrates how amazing, if heart-breaking, the experience can be for foster parents taking these children in.

“I know there is such a need,” Gerst said. “That’s probably one of the most amazing gifts and difficulties. You love a child regardless of whether it is your birth child.”

When he was five months old, Logan turned blue. His grandmother took him to the emergency room at Greenville Memorial, where doctors decided immediately to have him flown to Charleston for an emergency heart-valve replacement.

Logan’s teen-aged parents showed up at the hospital drunk, angry and violent. Social Services stepped in, and the parents were removed.

“At that point, there was no one to come see this little boy,” Gerst said. “The nurses at the ICU were … they became, he became their child. They were all young nurses that I got to know very, very well.”

The baby had been in the grandmother’s care, but she couldn’t handle the feeding tube he needed to overcome reflux problems.

She thought she was hurting him.

He wasn’t growing.

“This was huge. Not just a sick child but a dying child. To have that laid in your lap. That’s where the system may have failed,” Gerst said. “I don’t know that the grandmother knew Logan was terminal, how important it was that she be consistent with every bit of his care.”

Because Logan’s family was low-income and didn’t have much education, she said, it seemed doctors and case workers didn’t level with them like they did with her. They see so many patients and no one broke it down in a way Logan’s family could comprehend.

Gerst, who’d had experience in foster care with medically fragile children, got a call from South Carolina MENTOR, a private foster agency that contracts with DSS to find homes for medically fragile children.

“That’s where the system worked,” she said.

Gerst called a family meeting to ask her husband and children if they were OK with having the boy stay. They’d had a difficult experience with another foster child, but the decision was unanimous – of course they wanted to take Logan in.

At seven months, when Gerst picked him up from the hospital, Logan looked more like a newborn.

“I thought they needed someone for maybe a month, which is often how they say it,” Gerst said. “He wasn’t thriving, so it was failure to thrive.”

A week later, Gerst took him back to the hospital for a doctor’s visit. That’s when she was informed the baby was terminal.

“I remember going out to the car with Logan in my arms and just thinking, ‘Oh my  gosh, what am I supposed to do? I think I’m supposed to help this little boy die.’”

Several weeks later, Logan’s automatic valve failed, and he had to go back to the hospital in Charleston for open-heart surgery. Planes struck the World Trade Center shortly before she was to leave, but Gerst said she barely registered the national tragedy.

“It was so odd to be … being disconnected because my whole world lived and breathed for Logan,” Gerst said. “It was the most incredible and difficult thing I’ve ever experienced.”

Logan would be in the ICU for three weeks. Gerst stayed at the Ronald McDonald House nearby. She observed families whose children died while she was there and other families joyfully reunited with children on the mend – and she didn’t know where she fit in. She’d quickly realized, though, she loved Logan like he was her own.

“At that point in time, I was thinking, ‘This is it. We are going to lose him,’” Gerst said. “Then we didn’t lose him. Then I thought, ‘Am I supposed to help this child live?’ All I knew was that we were supposed to love him.”

Logan would spend 11 months with Gerst, her husband and her children – plus a German exchange student they’d arranged to have stay with them before Logan came into the picture. All the children in the house gave up time with Gerst. It was, she said, their gift to Logan.

“Steffi was supposed to be with us for six months and ended up staying a whole year.”

By winter, Logan was putting on weight and rolling over. He was off the oxygen and the tubes. He had about a month of normal life before his weak heart caught up with him. He would spend most of his remaining months in the hospital.

When he died on June 4, 2002, Gerst was preparing to adopt him. She grieved for years.

“After I lost him it was very difficult because I felt like I couldn’t do anything that important ever again,” Gerst said.

Today, Gerst is a teaching aide for special needs students at Mauldin High School and has continued volunteering with Building Dreams, a mentoring program for children of incarcerated parents. She hasn’t returned to foster care.

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Touched and Inspired  - The world needs more people like Tari   |98.185.27.xxx |2009-09-21 08:22:53 Logan and I are very similar in that we were both lucky enough to be touched by someone who offered the gift of a responsible, compassionate, and patient care-giver. So many other people are not so lucky, and so I implore anyone who is touched by this article to do something about it. Even mentoring a little can go a long way in the eyes of someone who needs it. Never underestimate your potential to do good in this world. God bless. Reply

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