A courageous baby girl who was declared “clinically dead” has stunned her family and medics by recovering from meningitis.
Doctors had told Lillie-Mai’s devastated parents that it would be best for her life support machine to be switched off.
But when Rupert Jackson noticed that his little girl had started to respond to noise medics gave her a second chance.
Amazed
And though the valiant youngster has had to endure eleven operations and have both of her legs and one of her arms amputated her survival has amazed doctors.
Mr Jackson described his daughter’s fight for life saying: “I noticed that every time someone closed the door and it banged there would be a small response. It wasn’t much but I could see her reacting.
“I just kept thinking that must mean there was some brain function. Two hours passed, then three, then four, and we started feeling more hopeful.”
Survival
Lillie-Mai was originally given a two per cent chance of survival when she was admitted to hospital after contracting meningitis at just 14 weeks.
And after she suffered a heart attack just two days later doctors advised her parents that it would be best to switch off their daughter’s life support machine.
Describing the ordeal Belinda Little, Lillie-Mai’s mother, said: “It’s difficult to describe how I felt, it was as though I was stuck in a nightmare.
Home
“I said I don’t care if she is brain damaged, or how brain damaged she is. We just want to take her home.”
Lillie-Mai will still need to undergo further treatment, but her parents are trying to raise money so that she can be fitted with prosthetic legs in the future.
Earlier this year it emerged that a brave mother had risked her life to deliver a healthy baby girl defying doctors who advised her to abort the baby.
Determined
Donna Hewetson’s pregnancy was causing her to produce hormones which caused tumours to develop on her vital organs, rupturing a kidney. The pregnancy also caused another condition which caused her to suffer a lung collapse.
However, the 29-year-old was determined to bring her daughter into the world after enduring the grief of an earlier miscarriage.