Chloe's Story
- By Lynda

What an eventful 11 years we have had so far in our beautiful girl’s life.

I’ll start at the beginning when I had a problem free pregnancy and then labour started.  From that moment on our world would change forever.  We had a very distressed baby which was born by natural means with an Agpar score of only 2.  She became stuck during the birth and didn’t breathe for the first few minutes of her life.  The first thing we noticed was her club foot which we were told could easily be corrected through casting.  3 days later she had a temperature which remained for 2 days so we were sent to the children’s hospital in the neonatal section for a further 2-3 days.  She came out in a rash we discovered was only a viral infection.  During her stay in the children’s hospital they did some tests on her and discovered that she had a horse-shoe kidney and 2 dislocated hips.  She also had a hemi-vertebrae which was causing mild scoliosis.  We were devastated as this was our first child and had no idea what we were facing.  At 8 weeks old she had her first major hip operation which proved to only be partly successful.  Her club foot and hips were all plastered for a duration of 6 weeks.  She suffered terrible colic each day and were unable to help ease her pain due to plaster coming up to her stomach.  One hip is more deformed than the other and required surgery 2 months later.  Meanwhile we were struggling with her sleep and feeding problems.  She also required glasses due to a lazy eye for a couple of months.  The first year of her life was spent in a beanbag but was very happy.