Meet Marissa a fun loving 9-year-old girl from Eastern Washington. The smiley kitty loving middle child from a family of 7, with the nickname of Rissa for short. She is a star student and adored by all who meet her. She is always hanging out with her bestest friends trying to talk her mom into sleepovers every weekend. She takes Acro, Cheer, and wants to be a doctor one day. This little girl has a heart of gold, you would never know that heart was destroying Rissa’s seemingly perfect childhood. Her life took a sad and scary turn at age 6.
Back in 2017 my dearest friend Kayla and her husband Marco took their, then 6-year-old daughter, Marissa to a doctors appointment and instead of going home with the normal healthy check up they ended up with a referral to Seattle Childrens cardiology. Rissa was later diagnosed with Ventricular Tachycardia, PVCs (extra heartbeats) and trigeminy. This wonderful little soul lives a “normal” day with an abnormal rhythm sometimes up around 180-200 beats per minute to this last episode down to 30-40 beats a minute. Seattle Childrens did an unsuccessful open-heart surgery, her little heart was just too small at that point to do anything with. The doctors now need to wait for her heart to grow in size, they are guessing about 5 more years. While she waits she is trying to live as normal of a life as she can. However, with heart runs of over 200 or under 40 she is not allowed to be alone, it is just too dangerous. She has left school in an ambulance this school year. These episodes come with no warnings. To ensure safety school staff must escort her everywhere, even into the bathroom. This has left her family, teachers, and the doctors in a state of anxiety. It has been strongly suggested that Rissa gets a specially trained Cardiac service dog who could sense her heart rhythms and be trained to get her help incase of any episodes that render Rissa unable to speak or worse pass out.
Kayla and Marco are very loving parents, and like everyone else, just try to make ends meet. They try to keep up with all of their kids’ needs, interests, and even most of Rissa’s ever expanding medical bills and ambulance rides, but this is leaving them very strapped. They are trying their best to figure out how to keep Rissa safe and how to also allow her as normal of a childhood as they can. A trained cardiac dog Could handle this however will cost around 10,000 dollars just for the initial cost of the dog and training. They are putting aside a savings for this service dog, however, to raise the funds in a reasonable amount of time will be near impossible. I am asking from the bottom of my heart to please help this wonderful family give Rissa a safer option to go through life. All donations will go towards the service dog for Rissa. Thank you for taking time to get to know just a small snippet of Rissa, my best friends sweet little girl.
