Help Support Laurel Thornhill's Open-Heart Surgery

First, I want to thank you for coming by to take a look at our GoFundMe. Myself and my wife Tawney are usually extremely private with family/personal matters so it is not easy to come forward and ask for help in this matter. However, due to our current circumstances I am trying to get ahead of the inevitable bills we will be receiving in weeks and maybe months to come. As PTO and FMLA have run out, those bills will only get worse.

What the GoFundMe is aiming to cover is the expenses for our daughter Laurel's recent emergency open heart surgery she is currently recovering from.

For a bit of backstory:

Our daughter fell into the "failure to thrive" category as she has only gained 2 lbs in the 5 months of her life. We had been directed to get labs done to check what could be the issue and nothing was coming back, so we had been directed to a feeding clinic to see if she was not feeding properly. As that had shown no issues, they suggested being admitted to UPMC Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh so the specialists could come to us, instead of having to travel and schedule tests over and over. Once here, they wanted to put her on a set schedule to eat which would involve taking milk through a bottle and finishing off the rest in a feeding tube. The following week she ended up being at a lower weight than she was when she was admitted to the hospital so they scheduled more tests to be done, as the feeding schedule proved pointless.

By chance, they decided to check her heart and sure enough she was diagnosed with ALCAPA. It's a congenital heart defect that 1 out of 300,000 people are born with. The short explanation is that the aorta is supposed to have 2 arteries. Hers had 1 and the 2nd grew from a different part of the heart and was essentially non-functioning. She had surgery scheduled for that night to go into the heart, remove the anomalous artery and place it where it needed to be. She came out of the surgery having done well but unfortunately ended up needing an ECMO machine to operate the heart for her...mostly to give it a break and to help keep all her levels stable.

As of today, she had been doing well enough and they have since tested her heart to see if it could function on its own, which it ended up passing. The ECMO was removed and she had her chest closed up and is currently on a ventilator. Beyond that, she's also at the stage of balancing her sedation and meds to keep her in a comfortable position to continue on the road to recovery. So far the outlook is good and the situation has been going uphill. She's had very slow progress, but progress nonetheless. From our understanding, there won't be anything going forward that should hinder her from a normal life and sports/exercise shouldn't be an issue. We don't know how long she will be in the hospital for as it has already been a few weeks and she is still in the CICU. I by no means am trying to make her situation seem terrible, as it has been expressed to us she is following the normal path for recovery, if only at a slower pace.

We don't know the overall cost of her surgery and extended stay, we don't know how long that stay will be, and we have no idea what exactly to expect going forward. As I said at the beginning, I am simply trying to get ahead of the future costs and try to take 1 more stresser out of our minds for the time being. Tawney has been in the hospital with Laurel every single day and despite being told she should go home by nurses and parents, she wants to be with our daughter every step of the way. If you have any questions please feel free to reach out. I will continue to make updates throughout her recovery. Each day is 1 step closer to seeing her popular cheeseball smile and I look forward to being able to share those pictures with you as she gets back to her old self.

Any and all help is greatly appreciated.

If any funds end up not being used, they will be donated to The Children's Heart Foundation, to aid in congenital heart defect research