Please help Mila

Please help Mila

We see how inquisitive and curious Mila is about life and it breaks our hearts knowing that Mila could one day be a prisoner in her own body, as she has spastic quadriplegia cerebral palsy.

We may not have the money but we will do everything in our power to help our daughter have a better life.

This life changing surgery (selective dorsal rhizotomy) will ensure Mila has a better quality of life and enable her to explore it's many wonders more freely, please help us make this dream a reality for Mila.

Last year we were pregnant with twins, scans showed that one of our babies was a lot smaller than the other and we were referred to 3 different hospitals.

We were told that one or both of our babies could die and we needed to go in for scans every week so that doctors could monitor us.

At 21 weeks, the flow in the smaller baby’s umbilical cord started to reverse and we were flown to Auckland hospital to consider terminating the smaller baby to save the bigger baby.

When we got to Auckland the scan showed that the flow in the umbilical cord was now moving forward and the baby had grown, they gave us the option to terminate our smaller daughter to be on the safe side but we very much wanted to keep her. We had already named both of them and had grown so attached to them from the weekly scans.

At 28 weeks doctors told us we were on the home stretch and the percentage of our child passing away was just over 10% so we embraced pregnancy for the first time in months, putting together a beautiful room for the girls, daydreaming about their 21st birthdays and what they may look like.

I posted pregnant photos on Facebook for the first time and was counting down the days until our C-section which was booked at 32 weeks gestation.

At 29 weeks we were booked for a scan, we had, had so many scans that we could understand all the data on the screens and recognise the body parts; we could see the sonographer looking for the smaller baby’s heart, right where it was meant to be there was no movement. We knew instantly she was gone…

I continued to carry both babies because doctors had told us our bigger baby will most definitely survive and she would be given the best chance at life if she was allowed to grow further in the womb. It was a difficult few weeks.

At 32 weeks I went into premature labour and both of our daughters were born. Mila had a 3 and a half week stay in the neonatal intensive care unit.

When we got Mila home, it was a hard couple of months of grieving but we got through it and when Mila was 5 months old we finally started to feel a bit normal again with less bad days than before.

Then bad news knocked us again. Therapists noticed Mila wasn't meeting her milestones and sent us to see a paediatrician who told us Mila has spastic quadriplegia cerebral palsy.

She is now 8 months old and cannot suck her thumb or sit unaided and there is a high chance she will be in a wheelchair and dependent on someone for the rest of her life.

We researched online without sleep for many nights trying to find a way for our daughter to have a better life and found a light at the end of the tunnel, a surgery call selective dorsal rhizotomy that has been proven to help children with cerebral palsy regain independence and walk unaided.

This surgery would be such a blessing and help our daughter live a more normal life.

2yrs old is the optimum age to have the surgery before her body starts to deform due to spasticity and then she may also require orthopaedic surgery.

It is our dream to have the surgery around her 2nd birthday.

This surgery has to be accepted by Saint Louis hospital, USA, when Mila is around 2yrs old, she will most certainly be accepted, if in the small chance her admission is declined we will work for 2 years in New Zealand to get Mila in the right condition for surgery if all else fails 100% of funds raised will be used to make Mila's life as comfortable as possible.

Every donation big or small would mean so much to our family and we are very grateful to GiveaLittle for giving us this opportunity otherwise it would have never been possible.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read our story xx