Author: Ann Giganti
About the author: Ann Widick Giganti
A chance meeting with the Voiceless Child transformed Ann Giganti’s life forever. Fourteen-month-old Heather wasn’t much more alert than a rag doll. A ventilator blew breaths into her lungs. Ann thought the child was having a seizure, but then noticed the tracheotomy breathing tube in the neck.
“Instead of having a seizure, the child was silently crying. I walked over to little Heather, our eyes met for a brief instant; and her soul gripped mine,” the author said.
Ann is still incredulous at how that moment changed everything. She first published the story of their struggle to adopt little Heather and of the surgeon, Dr. Bruce Maddern, who performed the miraculous voice-giving surgery in Woman’s Day, Germany’s Bildwoche, and England’s Woman.
For a dozen years, as a registered nurse, Ann worked with women giving birth. After becoming Heather’s adoptive mother, Ann switched to the in-home care of critically ill children. Unanswered questions nagged at her and prompted graduate school studies to become a nurse-practitioner. An accomplished nurse-practitioner, certified in both family practice and pediatrics, she has cared for more than fifty thousand patients.
In Peoria, IL, she tended children undergoing critical heart surgery and those in lung failure. For ten years, Ann worked in general pediatrics with a physician who had emigrated from India. Travel assignments take her to clinics in major cities or remote areas such as the Lakota Sioux Indian reservation in Pine Ridge, SD.
Many people are unaware of the miracles bestowed by surgeons who restore voice and hearing. Thousands of children await a permanent home. Their sorrows motivated Ann to give speeches and publish features in prominent magazines. Other publication credits include nursing journals, and adoption literature. “Airway Suction: Not So Simple,” for one of two hundred research posters displayed at Academy of Otolaryngology’s national meeting.
As a child, Ann observed rockets thundering skyward from Kennedy Space Center, from early blow-ups to the successful Apollos that flew men to the moon. Her father, Fritz Widick, worked in all programs of space exploration and facilitated the way to the moon as chief test conductor for the lunar module.
Ann resides with her family in a beachside community on Florida’s east coast. She likes to go to the beach, kayak, play the guitar, and practice ballroom and country dancing.
