Photos by Ron Rittenhouse Aurora Cutright, right, passes out Monopoly money to employees at the birthday party for WVU Medicine Children’s Hospital on Monday.

Amy Bush, Chief Administrative Officer at WVU Medicine Children’s Hospital, speaks during the celebration.

Aurora Cutright wears a birthday crown and earrings at the third birthday party for WVU Medicine Children’s Hospital on Monday.

MORGANTOWN — Sara Myers had just finished lunch and was getting ready to eat again — but don’t judge her, OK?

“All these food trucks,” said Myers, who is a technician in the cardiac catheterization lab at WVU Medicine Children’s. “I kind of have to.”

That’s because there was a party going on, as the old song says — and it was all for Myers and her colleagues who tend to young patients from across the Mountain State and surrounding areas.

Monday was the third anniversary of the hospital which officially began seeing patients on Sept. 29, 2022, and the place celebrated by filling one quadrant of the parking lot with those aforementioned food trucks that so tempted Myers on this afternoon.

A stream of staff found their way out for the proceedings.

“We’re celebrating our entire team,” Amy Bush, the hospital’s chief administrative officer, said during Monday’s event. “It’s about our medical staff and our caregivers and the patients and their families who entrust us.” 

A photo booth and a WVU Medicine Children’s version of the Monopoly board game went along with the festivities. 

Did Monday seem like three years?

“In some ways it feels like it’s been a long time ago,” Bush said of the facility that grew from the sixth floor of J.W. Ruby Memorial Hospital to command its own 10-story tower right next door. 

In most ways, though, she said, “It just feels like yesterday.”

Owe that to the urgency of the place, said Bush, a nurse by training — she knew as a little girl she was going to enter that profession — who advanced from the triage station into management. 

Time flies when you’re doing good, meaningful work, she said.

WVU Medicine Children’s offers a full range of treatment for its young patients, from cardiac care to cancer treatment, to dentistry and orthopedic services.

Sudden illnesses. Broken bones. Long-haul treatment to ensure a kid gets to go home.

The chief administrative officer gets the scope of that mission every morning, she said, just by gazing up at the building as she rolls into the parking lot for work. 

“We take care of kids and families during their most vulnerable times,” Bush said. “It’s a privilege and it’s an honor.”

And the next few months, she said, will be even busier.

Plans are underway to expand the hospital’s clinical space — meaning enhanced facilities for neurology out-patient services, a sleep lab, a plastic surgery clinic and more.

“We’re going for that one-stop shop,” she said.

Myers, meanwhile, had just turned 30 when she decided for a new start. That was six years ago, when she went back to school and entered the medical profession.

“This is a special place to work,” she said.