Benjamin's Memorial Fund: What it Does

You've read the story, now you want to know what this fund will do. Of course you do, as a donor and supporter of our work, you have every right to know where every single penny of your money will go.

It will go right here... to them.

We're raising money for our acute care fund, which is essentially the money we spend when the children get sick. ICU costs are the biggest. It costs about $400 a day for a child to stay in ICU. Ya'll, that's a lot of money.

Our Acute Care fund also pays for things like hospital stays when a child needs treatment for pneumonia or bronchitis. It pays for their post-op time, when they need additional care before being released home to us.

We never know when we'll be required to dip into this fund... sometimes a child crashes quickly and suddenly and we're filling up oxygen bags and on the phone with doctors trying to locate an empty hospital bed before it's too late. We can't anticipate it, although wintertime is the hardest on our little babies, but we are always so thankful that it is there.

Last year when the flu came through and Lydia and Wayne and Grace and Jeffery were struggling with pneumonia, their hospital costs came from our Acute Care Fund.

Earlier this year when Benjamin was admitted into PICU and was intubated again and again and we told the doctors to "do whatever they could", that was the Acute Care fund at work.

Last week, when Mason and Albert's breathing became labored and their wheezes audible without a stethoscope and they had to be admitted into the hospital... we were using the Acute Care fund.