It was natural for a mom in South Carolina who loves singing and playing the piano to be attracted to a piano sitting at the hospital when she took her son for a doctor’s appointment. However, she didn’t expect that her impromptu performance would lead her to raise awareness of her son’s condition.
In April 2018, Abigail Tanner, a mother of three, from Pendleton, took her 1-year-old son, Lincoln, to the Duke Cancer Institute in South Carolina for an appointment with a neurology specialist.
At the hospital, Tanner spotted a piano and decided to play and sing “Never Enough” from the film “The Greatest Showman.”
“It just heals my heart to be able to play and sing.”
Lincoln was diagnosed with malignant migrating partial seizures of infancy, a terminal form of epilepsy that caused the young boy to suffer from seizures.
“At one point, he was having over 200 seizures a day, and we’ve got them down to 20–30 on a good day,” Tanner said.
“For me, I go play any chance I get because it helps me to process what’s going on and also always just gives me a chance to sing to him or encourage others,” she said. “I always get to hear somebody else’s story from sitting at that piano, and that’s always a blessing to me.”