Two days and four planes later, traveling to Anchorage, Taipei and Saigon, she and 21 other volunteer nurses and doctors, members of Project Mend a Heart, arrived at their destination: Hue, Vietnam.

Within two days of her arrival, she was in the operating room with her volunteer colleagues, performing heart repair surgery on 16 children, ranging from 4 months to 2 years of age. Most of their young patients are blue, suffering from Tetralogy of Fallot. On average, the surgery takes three to four hours. Working 16-hour days, they regularly performed three surgeries each day.

“There are over 500 children on the waiting list for heart surgery,” Hartley said. “They don’t do heart surgery on the adults, only the children. The problem is the family has to pay the equivalent of $1,200 U.S. dollars and their annual salary is the equivalent of $550. So many children die.

“The other problem is the hospital only has four beds in its ICU. Once the children leave ICU, there's no place for them to go to continue to receive nursing care. They just go to rooms where their family has been waiting for them for days. With the equipment and staff we bring, we are able to increase the number of ICU beds.”

Before the volunteer medical team arrives, the attending surgeon at Vietnam’s Hue Central Hospital prescreens the young patients, determining how significant their heart disease is and selects the patients who will receive the surgery.

“It would cost about $100,000 to bring a Vietnamese child here and do the surgery,” she said. “It cost our 22- member team $40,000 to travel and stay there while we did the surgery on the 16 children. This year, the funds were donated by the Gift of Life Program from a Rotary Club in New Jersey. Some members of our medical team were from there as well. We also sent 100 boxes of equipment and medical supplies, valued at $200,000, which were donated to us. We hand-carried the medicines. Although we just got back, we don’t waste any time and have already started trying to get donations for next year’s trip.”

Many of the fifth-grade families at Palm Crest Elementary School donated baby aspirin and Tylenol, as well as other toiletries, which Hartley had packed in her carry-on luggage.

“In December I went and spoke to all the fifth graders at Palm Crest, since my daughter Molly is in one of the classes,” Hartley said. “I asked them to make little packages of toiletries, including bottles of aspirin, and include a picture of their family so that I could give them to the patients’ families. The response and generosity was unbelievable. I managed to get them all packed and when we gave them out, the families were so grateful and excited about the photos. We took the extra packages and gave them out at three different orphanages. They don’t have baby aspirin there.”

Hartley had a sternal saw in her luggage and it caused a delay and concern when she was trying to clear customs in Vietnam. Because of its shape, it appears similar to a handgun while being viewed through the x-ray machine. She was also questioned indepth concerning the large volume of medications she possessed.

This is Project Mend a Heart’s medical team’s second annual mission to Vietnam, although it is Hartley’s third trip (she went on the initial planning trip).

“Each day is exhausting, but we are saving children’s lives. I can’t tell you just how wonderful it feels to see the look on the mothers’ faces the first time they see their child a couple of days after surgery, since they are pink — not blue — anymore,” she said. “There the parents are not allowed to see their child while they are in ICU. We don’t ever see the children we operated on the year before.”

Hartley admits it is hard to leave her daughters — Caitlin, Molly and Annie — who are cared for by Hartley’s parents, who arrive from Vancouver and stay two weeks.

“I do call home on my cell phone every day and e-mail them. I take their pictures and put them up in my hotel room,” she said.

Although her daughters miss her, they said they are proud she is helping other children.

When it comes to aiding children, Hartley always seems to have time to assist with surgeries. She is also a member of the Milagors Para Ninos and will be traveling to Ecuador in April to assist in the operating room, where plastic surgery is done to correct cleft palates and lips.