DANVERS, MASS. (WHDH) - A Danvers mother who lost her daughter to cancer in 2011 has been granted a patent for a protective hand-sewn sleeve that’s aimed at helping other young children who need to live with permanent IVs.
Kezia Fitzgerald, who battled cancer alongside her infant daughter, Saoirse, realized the need for such a device after trying to keep her baby from pulling her IV out of her arm.
“How do you explain to an 11-month-old who can’t even talk yet — don’t play with it, don’t poke at it, don’t pull it?” Fitzgerald said.
That’s exactly what the sleeve she created does.
“Basically it keeps it off the skin and in the pocket,” she said.
When she lost Saoirse to cancer in 2011, Fitzgerald said she set out to create a solution in memory of her daughter.
“After she passed away, we thought to ourselves, ‘we have two options,'” Fitzgerald recalled. “One was we could decide it’s too hard, decide the grief was too much and we wanted to just walk away … or we could decide this was something other people needed.”
And earlier this month, just days before the anniversary of Saoirse’s death and in time for Christmas, Fitzgerald was granted a patent.
“We could let her live on through this as we got it to other people,” she said.
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