MONTREAL – Dr. David Hornstein has seen thousands of patients in his career, but none have touched him quite like Lauren Alexander.
He was so moved by the life and sudden death of this student from California, that he has launched a foundation in her name in the hopes of keeping her spirit alive.
Hornstein, an internist at the intensive care unit at the Montreal General Hospital, was the chief on-call when Lauren was rushed to the ICU in January,2013.
The 20-year-old McGill University student had collapsed in the hallway of her apartment building.
“She was in shock and she had just had a cardiac arrest,” Hornstein explained.
Lauren had suffered a sudden cardiopulmonary arrest due to a massive pulmonary embolism, a blood clot in the lung.
She was just six weeks shy of her 21st birthday.
Within an hour after her arrival at the hospital, her parents received a phone call that would change their lives forever.
“It’s so unexpected, it’s shocking, it’s something you can’t even let into your body because it’s such intense pain and fear,” recalled her mother, Jane Alexander.
WATCH BELOW: In the second of a three-part series exploring the Montreal General Hospital ICU, Global News senior anchor Jamie Orchard meets Lauren Alexander’s family, who rushed from California to Montreal to be by her side in her final moments.
Jane and Micheal Alexander were a six-hour plane trip away, in Lauren’s hometown of Walnut Creek, California, a suburb just east of San Francisco Bay.
They rushed to her bedside, but there was little her doctors could do to save her.
“It’s just this feeling of total helplessness,” her father said.
“There’s your child laying there with all the tubes and monitors and medicine and there’s nothing that you can do.”
Three days after she collapsed, Lauren’s friends and family held hands in a circle around her bedside, said a prayer, and tearfully gave her their final good-byes.
Hornstein was with them when she died.
“In this case I couldn’t leave the room,” Hornstein told Global News.
“I just remember saying this doesn’t make sense, this can’t be.”
Hornstein is not quite certain why Lauren’s death affected him more than the many others he has witnessed.
“Honestly, I don’t know, I don’t really know why, but how can you not connect with that type of a situation, which is just so horrible,” he said.
“I can tell you I do remember looking at her hospital card and her birthday was three days off of my own daughter’s birthday. My daughter was also out of town studying at the time.”
Lauren’s death stayed with him, and spurred Hornstein to act on an idea that had been percolating in his mind for quite some time.
A few months before Lauren died, Hornstein witnessed Bita Danechi, a nurse in the ICU, paying a taxi fare for a distressed family.
Danechi has worked in the ICU for 12 years and said she has witnessed the sheer terror family members face as they rush to the bedsides of their loved-ones.
So, she started paying for little things out of her own pocket to help them cope.
“Anybody else would have done the same thing,” she told Global News.
“It’s just normal. This is what we do as a human being.”
When Hornstein noticed what she was doing, he thought perhaps they could launch a fund.
A few months later, he summoned the courage to reach out to Lauren’s parents and ask to use her name for the foundation.
“I just thought maybe if we could lend her name, I mean it’s not going to bring her back, but maybe it would lend a certain spirit to the fact that she had been on the planet,” Hornstein explained.
Her family was shocked.
“I was just flabbergasted, I was shocked, that a doctor would do this,” Lauren’s father said.
“David was so respectful, so cautious about making sure that everything that was done would honour Lauren and who she was.”
As the doctor and parents spoke, Hornstein began to get a clearer picture of who Lauren Alexander was.
“I came to realize that she was truly an exceptional human being and her spirit fit perfectly with what I was trying to do,” he said.
The Lauren Alexander ICU Support for Families Fund was founded in 2013, raising much-needed money so that staff at the ICU can provide all the little things distressed families might need.
“It’s about connecting to people when they’re in crisis and taking care of those basic needs,” Lauren’s mother explained.
“It’s as if Lauren is there taking care of those people, that’s very much about who Lauren was.”
The third annual Lauren Alexander fundraiser will be held at the Rialto Theatre in Montreal on Saturday, April 30, 2016.
It features a pasta opera and rock and roll show with several bands, including one fronted by Hornstein.
Lauren’s parents, who travel from California every year for the event, said they couldn’t be more proud.
“She was that way in life, ” her father remembered tearfully.
“She did little things for her friends all the time, all the time, and she’s doing them now.”