Call it a mother's intuition.
Last July 31, Amanda and Matt Arneill's five-month-old baby girl, Lauren, was losing weight and having trouble sleeping. They called a nurses' line and took her to a walk in clinic and the family doctor - everyone said she was OK, but Amanda knew something wasn't right with her little girl.
"She seemed like she was losing her spark," she says. "I just felt like - I don't know - there was something else there."
The new parents took Lauren to B.C. Children's Hospital, where she was admitted to emergency. A doctor detected a heart murmur, and in the middle of further diagnostics, the baby girl's heart stopped. Amanda and Matt were holding her, when she had started to dry heave and suddenly seized up. They handed her off to doctors, who rushed her off to be resuscitated.
"I just remember standing in the hallway screaming on the top of my lungs, 'This can't be happening,'" Amanda says. "It was terrible."
Doctors started CPR, trying to get Lauren back.
"I can't tell you how long it was. Time just stopped," Amanda recalls.
Then, Lauren started to cry. She was admitted to the intensive care unit, and despite the earlier medical opinions, it was obvious there was something incredibly wrong with her heart. Lauren had ALCAPA, a congenital heart defect so rare, only one in 300,000 births are affected. Most babies die within their first year unless they get surgery.
But with Lauren, two surgeries and a pacemaker later, her heart functions are slowly returning to normal, and Amanda describes her as a happy and energetic 16month-old.
"She's going a mile a minute all the time," she says.
Amanda is convinced if she had not taken Lauren to the hospital that fateful day, her daughter would not have made it.
But with the one-year anniversary of the ordeal approaching, Amanda and Matt were looking for a way to reframe the harrowing experience, so they decided to hold a massive garage sale, with all proceeds going to the hospital.
"That's why we are doing this, to try to take this from a scary anniversary to something we can celebrate and give back," Amanda says.
The garage sale fundraiser is set for Saturday, July 20, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., at 3795 Watling St. in Burnaby.
Several people have donated items, and Amanda says there will be furniture, household items, kids' toys and clothing.
The family is hoping to raise $3,000 and they will drop the money off on July 31, the one-year anniversary of Lauren's lifesaving trip to the hospital.
