Their baby had a medical emergency. How opening an ice cream shop helped a Fresno family
The newlywed owners of Fresno food truck Twisted Masala thought they had it all planned out.
After launching an Indian-American fusion food truck, they had their future business goals detailed in a shared document on their phones. They spelled out their plans for expansion in increments of one, 10 and even 15 years.
Then life threw them the worst kind of curve. In the spring, their 2-month-old baby had a brain bleed and a seizure, and and was helicoptered to San Francisco for emergency medical care.
Baby Madi, now 9 months old, is back home and at least appears to be fine — though she still requires lots of careful observation for signs of permanent damage from the seizure.
So that’s why Madi’s parents threw their initial business plan out the window and bought an ice cream shop in central Fresno. The brick-and-mortar business is a lot better place than a sweaty food truck to keep an eye on the girl they call their miracle baby.
CREAM (short for Cookies Rule Everything Around Me) celebrated its grand re-opening earlier this month. It’s at Cedar and Barstow avenues in the Bulldog Plaza near Fresno State, serving ice cream sandwiches and other goodies.
Gurvinder Sandhu, 37, and Amanda Vogel, 33, bought the business, a franchise that originally opened there in 2015. It’s not unusual to see either of them there with Madi — short for Madilyn — in a wagon behind the counter.
There’s also a horde of other children around. The couple’s firstborn is 2-year-old Evelyn, and there’s Sandhu’s older kids from a previous relationship. Jazmyn, 12, is a key player in the social media accounts for the business — both on screen and behind it. And 15-year-old Rohaan is already organizing the books.
A couple of foster kids were in the mix for a while, too.
What Sandhu and Vogel went through is tough for any family, noted Mike Osegueda, president of Fresno Street Eats, which organizes food truck events around the city and has worked with the family.
But it’s especially tough when you own a tiny business instead of working a corporate job with lots of benefits and co-workers to pick up the slack.
“If you own a small business, you can’t necessarily always just take two months off to go deal with these kinds of things,” he said. “You have to learn how to juggle these things.”
From food truck to storefront
Sandhu and Vogel met before they got into the food business.
The couple fell for each other over a game of Pokemon Go while working in business sales at Comcast. When the bosses told them one of them had to leave the department, they decided to quit together.
“He was like, ‘Hey, why don’t we do a food truck?’” said Vogel, noting that Sandhu normally ate chicken nuggets and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
But the man with the golden retriever energy who goes to the gym five days a week was confident that his parents had taught him to cook well enough to run a mobile kitchen.
Twisted Masala opened in 2020, right before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down everything. They struggled through, pivoting to distributing healthy prepared meals at gyms. There were ups and downs, including the time a faulty propane line attached to the fryer inside the truck caught fire and burned Sandhu’s legs (he kept working for the rest of the lunch service before realizing his skin was bubbling and he headed to the ER).
The pair got engaged after two months of dating. “If you know, you know,” Sandhu said.
They married in 2021 and baby Evelyn came along in 2022. Madi came in January 2024 and Vogel became the blue-eyed, blond-haired mama bear who steers her family’s ship through all kinds of waters.
That includes the color-coded hourly schedule on their phones detailing everything from Rohaan’s choir practices to the many contracts the truck has for Clovis Unified School District events and others.
Emergency situation
But everything changed one day in April. Sandhu was away in Sonora on a multi-day trip with his 12-year-old’s class. Vogel came home to Madi throwing up on her mother-in-law. She was giving the baby a bath when she noticed something was very wrong.
“Her eyes did something crazy,” she said, something difficult to even put into words, but she knew it wasn’t right. They could see too much of the tops of the whites of her eyes.
They rushed her to Valley Children’s Hospital.
“Within 30 minutes, we were in the ICU and flying to San Francisco,” she said.
Rather, the baby flew to San Francisco with a medical team. Vogel had to scramble to find her own ride.
“I was terrified,” she said.
Madi had a brain bleed — a quarter-sized amount of blood on her brain that caused a seizure.
It could potentially cause brain damage. They huddled with four neurosurgeons, who floated an invasive surgery to relieve the pressure.
But because Madi was only 2 months old, she still had a soft spot in her skull that provided a little extra room. Somehow, her body reabsorbed the extra blood and she didn’t need surgery.
“That’s why she’s our miracle baby,” Sandhu said.
Pivoting to brick-and-mortar plan
The experience could have resulted in permanent brain damage. For now, Madi seems mostly OK. The only lasting effect is that she can’t move her eyes up to look at the ceiling.
“She can never roll her eyes at me,” Sandhu said.
She’s so young the doctors couldn’t do many of the tests to check for permanent damage. How do you check if a child has lost the ability to move her arm if she’s a baby who barely has motor control to begin with?
So they told her parents to keep a sharp eye on her. Make sure she hits all the development milestones such as crawling, and doesn’t lose any arm movements, for example, that could indicate further damage.
There are still risks. She could have another seizure. The blood is still there, but shrinking. She’s scheduled to have surgery next summer to look at the brain. And she has all sorts of doctors’ appointments each month.
“This is the whole reason for getting into a brick-and-mortar sooner rather than later,” Sandhu said.
It’s a lot easier to have a baby in an ice cream shop than a food truck where temperatures indoors regularly climb above 100 degrees, he said.
Said Vogel: “It’s such an incredible feeling to be able to keep an eye on her — that way I know she’s OK.”
Family priority
They still have the food truck, but it’s for sale. To buy into the CREAM franchise, they took out a second loan on their house and sold a vehicle.
Such a career change might seem abrupt, but it’s not surprising to Osegueda, of Fresno Street Eats. Ten years ago, his son, Cole, then 6 months old, had surgery that involved cutting open his skull because it had fused too early and his brain needed room to grow. He has since made a full recovery.
“In those moments, it’s hard to put anything else in front of your child,” he said. “That’s the only thing that matters. Going through those situations helps you reevaluate your priorities.”
So changing their business goals was a no-brainer, Sandhu said.
Since then, Madi has been smiling at just about anything and everybody. She frequently screeches in happiness. She still has lot of appointments and MRIs in her future, but appears to be OK.
And she’s not the only one. Osegueda said he frequently hears people comment on how upbeat and friendly the whole family is.
“If anyone can juggle all this stuff and get through it, it’s them,” Osegueda said.
This story was originally published October 27, 2024 at 5:30 AM.
