Nurse to Raise Son of Dying Single Mom

Mother made unusual request in hospital room
By John Johnson,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 20, 2014 12:00 PM CDT
Nurse to Raise Son of Dying Single Mom
   (Shutterstock)

A Pennsylvania woman diagnosed with terminal liver cancer had a second, awful problem to deal with: The single mom had nobody to take care of her 8-year-old son upon her death. But as WHTM of Harrisburg reports, salvation appeared in the form of her nurse. Tricia Somers, 45, had struck up a rapport with nurse Tricia Seaman in the hospital, and on the day Somers was to be discharged, she posed the big question: "If I die, will you raise my son?" Seaman, who already has three teens and a 10-year-old son, asked for time to think it over with her husband. "I didn't know what to say in that moment," she tells ABC News. "I was trying to be very diplomatic, everything in me was saying, 'Yes I'll do it.'"

She and her husband, who were already in the process of becoming foster parents and had just been approved as adoptive parents, did indeed say yes. "In 20 years, I have never had an occasion not to trust my wife's heart," explains husband Dan. Somers and son Wesley moved in with the Seaman family in May, and the Seamans have signed papers to become Wesley's legal guardians. Somers, meanwhile, is undergoing chemotherapy. "I am at peace and I accept it," she says. "I know he will be taken care of." (Click to read the story of a teacher who adopted a "holy terror" student no one else wanted.)

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