The Gardner family in Boxford know what it's like to have an ill child, so they're looking to help other families in the same situation.

Lori and Chris Gardner are holding a fundraiser this month at the indoor water park at the Sheraton Ferncroft in Danvers to raise money for the American Heart Association.

When Lori Gardner was about two months pregnant with her first child, she got some scary news: Something was wrong with her baby's heart.

"They did not know how severe it was, or what exactly they would have to do until Reese was born and they could do the ultrasound just on him," Lori Gardner said.

All they knew was that the blood was not flowing correctly through his tiny heart.

For the next seven months she lived with uncertainty, at times traveling to Boston for daily check-ups, spending the night in the hospital and staying on bed rest.

"I was worried throughout the entire pregnancy," she said.

The experience was so intense that Reese's parents are now stepping up their efforts to help other families who might be dealing with heart defects, which occur in about 35,000 babies each year, or 8 in 1,000 births.

Now, six years later, Reese is doing great, and the family feels ready to help others.

"I think this is the first year we feel like we're far enough away from all this happening that we want to do something like this," Gardner said.

Reese was born on a Monday in late April 2001 with a hole in his heart and a constriction of his aorta, the main artery carrying blood out of her heart to the rest of his body -- a difficult diagnosis, but not as bad as doctors feared. It turned out that the combination of the two heart defects is what allowed him to survive in the womb. With either one alone, he would have died, his mother said.

Gardner got one brief look at her newborn before he was rushed by ambulance from her bedside at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston to Children's Hospital. He went into surgery two days later.

"That was the hardest part, that I couldn't hold him," Gardner said.

In her mind, she kept returning to the story of a friend at church whose son had died of a heart defect.

"It was all very, very scary," she said.

The surgery lasted more than four hours. Gardner waited in her recovery room at Beth Israel for news. Finally she got word that everything went well.

Reese came home from the hospital about two weeks later -- just in time for Mother's Day -- with just two medications and some nursing help to make sure his incision site didn't get infected. His heart was repaired.

He is now a boisterous 6-year-old who likes Harry Potter and talking on the telephone. Though doctors still monitor his heart, he has no restrictions on what he can do.

"I like to ride my bike and I like to swim," Reese said. "I can swim really deep in the deep end."

The surgery that saved Reese's life was so new that it wasn't really perfected until about five years before he was born, Gardner said.

"Before then a lot of kids didn't even survive," Gardner said. "That's why we're doing this fundraiser. Without the amount of research, we wouldn't have been so lucky."



Heartwalk fundraiser

What: A party to raise money to sponsor local walkers in the American Heart Association's annual Boston Heartwalk

Where: Coco Key WaterPark at the Sheraton in Danvers

When: Wednesday, Aug. 29, from 4 to 9 p.m.

Cost: Admission is $20 per person (free for children under 2).

Tickets: Available at www.heartwalk.sharemyinfo.net