As most of you already know, Sophia, our warrior princess,
has proved herself to exceed our expectations in everything that we always hoped
and knew she was able to achieve and become. She is the most caring little
girl, who has the best sense of humour, can eat more than you can provide and
has a cry that ensures she always gets whatever she wants! Since Sophia was
born and suffered with congenital heart defect, I have always said that I would
do whatever I could possibly do to help Children’s Heart Surgery Fund (CHSF) as
we can never repay them for not just changing Sophia’s life, but saving both
hers and ours in everything they did for our family.

Today I received a letter from CHSF which showed a Baby MRI
Incubator. This will be a new, first-of-its-kind in the UK for babies with
congenital heart disease and heart MRI imaging. It will enable Leeds Congenital
Heart Unit at the LGI to safely perform MRI scans without the need for general
anaesthetic, which puts babies’ lives at risk. Unfortunately, Sophia was one of
those babies, who had to go through this, at just 5 months old.

Sophia needed many tests throughout the first nine months of
her life: scans, CT scans, MRI scans, and for a poorly baby - who was tube fed
and on oxygen for the majority of this time - this was not easy! I can remember
clearly the day of her MRI; we needed the results so badly to see visibly where
the holes in Sophia’s heart were and how the pulmonary stenosis was restricting
her blood flow to enable the consultants to plan and prepare us for what the
future held and what the next plan of action would be. Putting Sophia to sleep
under general anaesthetic was an absolute last resort and therefore the plan of
action was to feed Sophia (via tube) give a dummy (not much smaller than her
face!), swaddle her and hope that she would sleep through the MRI. Until this
point, I had never seen an MRI machine, or heard it! Safe to say, we waited for
our slot - I hoped that we would get answers from this. We lay Sophia in the
huge MRI machine and I had everything crossed that she would stay asleep and
still enough for them to capture what they needed. Then the machine started-
yep- who ever even thought a baby would sleep through that may need to try it
out for themselves; it was never going to happen. If you can imagine trying to
sleep on top of an aeroplane engine, that pretty much sums it up!  Plan aborted and baby completely distressed.
Plan B, the plan we did not want, a general anaesthetic.

At the time, having a general anaesthetic was the only way
the MRI could go ahead. Sophia was barely strong enough to breathe and eat by
herself; this was truly heart-breaking. All of this has influenced my decision
to try to prevent any other families having to go through what we went through.
There I have decided to fundraise for the baby MRI machine and the support I
have already received from family & friends signing up to help achieve this
means the world to me!

Therefore, I racked my brain, in all the free time I seem to
have, and decided to hatch a plan to help out this AMAZING cause! The benefits
of the baby MRI incubator are:

• you don’t have to move or wake baby
• it reduces the level of noise which currently
  causes babies to wriggle and cry and helps baby to stay asleep so accurate
  images can be captured
• it creates a cosy wrap and the temperature and
  humidity is regulated to baby’s needs
• it eliminates the need for a general anaesthetic
• it decreases exposure to radiation
• it gives faster, more efficient scans and is
  less distressing for babies and the whole family
• clearer and more informative images of hearts
  can be produced

So… I have asked/told 30 family and friends, some who can
run, and some who absolutely can’t (me being part of this group), to run 5K. Therefore,
from today I will be starting and a different person will be running 5K each
day until the 23^rd December (30 days in total) to raise money for
this life-changing piece of equipment. Anybody who cannot run due to illness (proof
required) I (and Rach!) will do these extra runs if needed! Thank you for taking
the time read my essay- I got carried away! And for visiting our JustGiving
page. Let’s do this!

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