Sophie Emily Mitchell 14.09.2015 - 25.10.2015

RIP little angel.

Sophie Emily Mitchell was born at 7.04am on Monday 14th September 2015, at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow, with a double inlet single ventricle heart, pulmonary atresia and transposition of the great arteries. She was a tough cookie and fought hard through seven surgical procedures and even pulled through a period of time on an ECMO heart and lung bypass system. But Sophie was quite small, which made it difficult for her main operation (a Blalock–Taussig shunt) to work. At 5.55pm on Sunday 25th October 2015 Sophie's shunt blocked and she had a cardiac arrest. She was less than a day from being 6 weeks old and had never made it home or out of the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU).

Our world was turned upside-down. Just hours before Sophie died she was smiling and had started taking Sarah's milk via a nasogastric tube. We thought she was on the path to growth and recovery.

Sophie's photo gallery: https://flic.kr/s/aHskC3zEFN

All the staff at the Royal Hospital for Children in Glasgow did such an amazing job and did absolutely everything they possibly could. The Yorkhill Family House made our tragic experience so much easier too. We live just over an hour away from the hospital, so staying at Yorkhill Family House enabled us to be just minutes away by foot from Sophie. It was so much more than accommodation though. Yorkhill Family House provided a home, support and friendship through very difficult times.

We are raising money for both:

• The Paediatric Intensive Care Unit at the Royal Hospital for Children in Glasgow; and
• The Yorkhill Family House Limited aka Ronald McDonald House Glasgow.

Our aim is to help fund more equipment, resources and training for the specialist ECMO service they run. ECMO stands for ExtraCorporeal Membrane Oxygenation and is basically a system that acts as your lungs and heart. Sophie was on ECMO for five days, which was an extremely risky and intensive period demanding two specialist nurses 24-7, and like all other specialist NHS national services, requires more resource and training.

£10,000 of our fund raising via this page will go to the The Yorkhill Family House Limited, with the remainder raised going to the PICU unit via Yorkhill Family House.

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