Claire Percy's world shattered as she watched her eight-month-old daughter lifeless on a surgical table for 10 minutes.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
For her daughter, Roxette, now two, The Royal Children's Hospital has become a second home.
She entered the world with her liver disconnected from her body, causing the majority of her blood to go straight to her heart instead of being filtered through her liver.
She was also born with multiple holes in her heart, requiring surgery at eight-months-old.
Disaster struck during surgery when her femoral artery was accidentally nicked, causing her to start to bleed out and go into cardiac arrest.
She was dead for 10 minutes before surgeons at Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital saved her life.
"It's very hard. I'm very emotional ... you just never know what could happen to your own family," Mrs Percy said, before breaking into tears.
Although the fight continues, with another surgery scheduled next month, Roxette's family want to thank the many doctors and nurses that helped her get to this point through the annual Good Friday Appeal on March 29.
"If everyone could just find a way to give generously. It's so important," Roxette's grandfather Andrew Pollard said.
"You don't know whether it's your child, grandchild or your next door neighbour's child. It touches everybody.
"They do such a wonderful job down there."
On Friday, the Border's emergency services are asking the community to dig deep with the aim to beat the almost $222,000 donated by Albury and Wodonga residents last year.
For the first time, Albury Wodonga Health will receive $250,000 from this year's fundraising efforts for paediatric services, despite initially missing out.
After just beating Albury in donations last year, Wodonga CFA's Read Hedditch said he wanted to win one last time before donations were recorded together next year.
"There is a bit of a rivalry, but that's just there to get everyone to push a little harder and have a bit of fun," he said.
"The net result last year was (almost) a quarter of a million dollars going into the Good Friday Appeal.
"If we combine those totals, we're above Ballarat, Bendigo and Geelong. So we're going to take the parochialism to the bigger regional areas and have a crack at them now and see if we can motivate them to beat us.
"But, at the end of the day, the goal is about helping kids that need support in the early stages where they end up in hospital."
Albury and Border Rescue Squad captain Paul Marshall said if people were thinking about sleeping in on Good Friday, think again.
"We're going to wake you up - there's no two ways about it," he said.
"We're going to wake you up on Friday morning with our lights, with our sirens, and we make no apologies for that because we want to fill our tins.
"We want to make this a record year, and we want to give to the Royal Children's Hospital."
If stuck for cash, this year's appeal will also allow people to donate via QR code and EFTPOS machines carried by volunteers.
"We know now it's going to be harder to rattle those tins because not everybody's got change in their pocket," Mr Marshall said.
"So bring your phones out, bring your cards out. We do have electronic means this year as well, or you can jump online, you can QR code it.
"But if you do that, please make sure you remember that you're from the Albury-Wodonga area, so we all get the credit."