Costco North Lakes and Ipswich are set to again support Mater Little Miracles with their annual fundraising campaign in-store kicking off in September!
We are so excited to see what they can achieve this year for our tiniest and most vulnerable patients.
We have proudly witnessed the staff at Costco stores in North Lakes and Ipswich work tirelessly year after year to raise funds in support of Mater Little Miracles—raising more than $471,000 since 2015! What a phenomenal effort from everybody.
This committed and generous support changes outcomes for mothers and babies at Mater.
We consider ourselves incredibly lucky to partner with such an extraordinary group of people who enable Mater to give sick and premature babies, like Moira, the best possible start to life.
Moira didn’t take her first breath until she was 12 weeks old.
Until then, she’d relied on a specialist ventilator to push air into her tiny lungs, 24 hours a day. Without it, she could have died within minutes.
When mum Ashlee’s waters broke, she was terrified. At the time, she was only 23 weeks pregnant.
“We thought we'd lost her. Most people are told that anything under 24 weeks is not viable. We were just thinking the worst,” Ashlee said.
Ashlee and her husband Ben raced to hospital, where they discovered little Moira still had a heartbeat.
Soon afterwards, Moira came into the world. She came out fighting for life.
“She was kicking and trying her hardest to breathe, but she was still too small for that,” said Ashlee.
When a baby is born prematurely, often their lungs aren’t fully developed. They simply can’t breathe on their own and their only chance of survival is to go on a ventilator immediately.
Thanks to generous supporters like Costco—Mater is able to invest in state-of-the-art ventilators designed specifically for the tiny and delicate lungs of premature babies.
“The main benefit is that we think we're causing less damage to the lungs,” Dr Luke Jardine explains. “If we can have a much more sensitive and accurate measure of the amount of volume going into the lungs, we're less likely to cause damage to the lungs. We know putting a breathing tube down and putting a baby on the ventilator actually damages the lungs. When the lungs are so small and fragile to start with, even little bits of damage can really decrease the baby's chance of surviving long-term.
“The ultimate aim with all of these ventilation techniques is be as gentle as possible on the lungs, let the baby grow and get bigger and stronger, and the lungs get bigger and stronger. And then hopefully they don't need breathing support or oxygen support as they get ready to go home.”
After Moira was born, she was taken straight to Mater’s Neonatal Critical Care Unit (NCCU), where she stayed for the next 124 days.
“I could touch her hand and that was about it,” Ashlee recalls. “She was so small that if I placed my hand on her, it was like I was giving her a hug”.
For the next three months, Moira fought hard for her life. And as long as she had strength to fight, the ventilator was there to keep her alive.
After twelve weeks in intensive care, Moira took her very first unassisted breath.
We want to thank the Costco teams and their customers for their ongoing support ahead of this year’s annual token campaign to save lives like little Moira’s.
