Meet Patrick
Meet Patrick
His lung issues have never kept him from doing what he loves!
A Letter From a Dream Parent:
Patrick has always had lung and breathing issues. But we only found out how bad it was this fall when he went in for some allergy and breathing tests when he applied for the military. Unfortunately, it was found he had an anaphylactic food allergy, which made him ineligible to join. The doctors also revealed that he had the lung capacity of an 80-year-old man. None of us expected to hear this kind of news.
The doctors had to completely disregard allergy testing because if they did those tests, they could potentially trigger other reactions because his lungs were in such bad shape. It could have been very dangerous to do his allergy tests. I wasn’t even able to be at his appointment with him. We had sent him to stay with his grandparents because a few of the kids were under the weather, and we didn’t want him to risk missing his tests.
Thankfully his grandma is a retired nurse and she was able to take in the diagnosis because Patrick totally tuned out. He had just heard you know, eighty-year-old man, and shut down. First, he’s told he can’t join the military, and now he's told that his lungs are this bad… I probably would have shut down too.
After that, they put Patrick on a pretty strict regime and treatment plan with different steroids and medicines. He had a follow-up in January and his lungs had improved, but they don’t know if there was going to be permanent lung damage. It came out of nowhere.
Last summer though, he was working at a fishing lodge near all the wild fires. I think that could have been a contributing factor. He had a lot of smoke exposure, and alongside a history of long issues, Patrick's asthma is quite bad. At his appointment, they explained that with an already poor perception of breathing quality, you wouldn't necessarily notice it getting worse. He’s had asthma from a young age.
After all this happened in the fall, his doctors fast-tracked everything, and that led us back to The Dream Factory. We have six kids, Patrick, Mirabelle, Zachar, Alexander, Sara, and Cedric. Patrick is our oldest. Sara and Cedric are both Dream Kids, so we already knew what to expect. There’s never a dull moment in our house!
Patrick is our fisherman, he will head out in any condition, even those days where it is minus 45 with the Windchill to go ice fishing. And he's actually gotten his grandmother really into fishing - she even has her own gear now! He’s also very interested in aviation. He applied to the post-secondary Institute for indigenous peoples in Canada for their piloting program.
Pictured: Dream Kid Jack at The Fishin’ Hole picking out his Dream fishing gear.
Unfortunately, they had a huge structural fire, and they lost their entire hangar and a few other buildings, their whole fleet of planes. It was a very big fire. So it's kind of on hold right now. He was hoping to start in the fall.
Well, originally, he had actually asked about going to Hawaii to go deep-sea fishing - so it was always going to be a fishing-related dream. But this winter everything shut down again, and because he was on a little bit of a time limit because he was 18, he decided to start thinking more locally. He thought about possibly asking about a boat, or doing a fishing trip in Manitoba. But realized he could use all the different kinds of fishing tools - from ice fishing and fly fishing.
Once he thought about that, then it was just he was very set on a full setup courtesy of The Fishin’ Hole being his dream. He's most looking forward to trying fly fishing because he's never tried it before!
-Bridget, Patrick’s mom.