Thank you for visiting my fundraising page for Olivia's Star Tribute Fund supporting the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) at the Bristol Children's Hospital and Ronald McDonald House Bristol. I set page in memory of our daughter, Olivia, who died from Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy at the age of 14 weeks. We're going to run Cheltenham Half Marathon to help raise money.
We've spent 25 days at PICU where Olivia was fighting for her life. This is the whole story:
We arrived in Bristol Children's Hospital on 22nd February. Everything started after a bath when Olivia refused to eat, started to make grunting noises, was unresponsive, pale and floppy. Emergency ambulance took us to Gloucester A&E where we found out that Olivia had sepsis and her heart was enlarged. After doing various tests doctors decided to take her to adult Intensive Care while we were waiting for another ambulance to transport us to Bristol. As she was deteriorating she had to be intubated and given adrenaline injection. After that Bristol team arrived with cardiologist, who had to drain fluid from around Olivia's heart before transporting her to Bristol as it was causing too much pressure on her heart.
Once we arrived in Bristol we were looked after amazing doctors and nurses, who worked hard to try and save her life. They did crazy amount of tests but they weren't coming back with anything. The only thing they found was that she had CMV virus, which was an unlikely cause for the heart problem. After weeks of waiting, Olivia was slowly getting worse and treatment she was getting was not changing anything. She had to start getting more and more drugs to keep her stable and during last day it was too much.
But we're trying to look positive even in that bad situation. Our daughter died in our arms with no pain. And the whole family had enough time to say good bye to her. We've donated her kidneys to save someone else's life which makes her death a little bit less painful as we know that part of her still lives on. And obviously we want to raise as much money as we can for this hospital as we were truly taken care of. We had people to talk to and a nice place to stay, which made it a bit easier.
So please donate as much as you can for those amazing charities! We chose to raise £5000 to see how close we can get to it and because one day in hospital with all those drugs cost around that.
Thank you very much for all your help xxxxx
