I believe that belief, combined with love and a touch of humor let us conquer anything.Mike Willard

My oldest daughter was born ten weeks premature, at two pounds, three and three quarter ounces, at that time the smallest child ever born in the Washakie County Memorial Hospital. Living in Idaho at the time, we just happened to be “home” on vacation. Carol’s water broke about four in the morning, by six we were at the hospital starting an incredible journey that would start us on a roller coaster ride of emotions.

They told us she might not survive, that she was too small and they called the Billings hospital. Our families gathered filling the hospital with love for this small little person we could not fix. When the air flight ambulance crew arrived they felt that the hospital in Billings could not handle a child this small either, she wouldn’t be able to survive. I remember reaching through the walls of her incubator pushing all the love I could through the plastic glove into her small, hardly breathing body, one lung already collapsed.

They called Denver, no room at the Inn; the University of Utah told them the same story. We prayed, we hoped, and we cried. The final call was to Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake, “We will build a room if we have to,” was their answer and they came to get her.

As the two families, barely joined together the year before, sat together the worry, the stress and the love for one another was a shield protecting us from the evil waiting outside. We were being interviewed about our family histories; they asked if either side had a history of premature births. My father-in-law spoke “My grandfather weighed a pound and a half when he was born and they kept him in the bread warming oven of their cook stove.”
My mother-in-law looked at him and exclaimed, “Did he live??”

It started small, but suddenly we were all laughing and somehow I knew she would be fine.

Missy was named for my grandmother, who was the toughest woman I ever met. She was named right, for she is the toughest little girl I know. In the last 25-plus years she has had many more doctors pronounce that she would not survive. We just laugh and love and believe she’ll live.

It drives them nuts.

Most know Worland native Mike Willard as the Executive Director of the Worland/Ten Sleep Chamber of Commerce where he also practices his core values of belief in the big picture, optimism toward the future, and a touch of humor in most everything he does.