Heart of Gold: Brave Baby Tiana

When Lisa King and Kevin Mackay announced the birth of their second child Tiana, they were over the moon. Baby Tiana was born on 16th December 2007 and weighed 5lb 14oz. Everything went well and mum and baby were fine. Lisa and Kevin took Tiana home later that day to introduce her to her new family and her new home.

Everything was fine until six weeks later during a routine baby check Tiana’s doctor discovered a heart murmur and referred her to Hospital. Four weeks later at just 10 weeks old, baby Tiana had a scan of her little heart where the doctors found that she had mitral regurgitation, which is a leaky heart valve. Lisa and Kevin were in complete shock and knowing very little about leaky heart valves, were extremely worried for their new baby daughter and not sure what to think.

The following week, after another scan by heart specialist Dr Derrick from Great Ormond Street Hospital they received some more bad news. During the scan, they discovered that Tiana had Alcapa, a very rare heart defect where the coronary artery is connected to the wrong part of the heart. Two days later Tiana was admitted to Great Ormond Street Hospital where doctors performed a six-hour operation on her tiny heart.

Lisa said “we were very shocked as we thought heart murmurs were fairly common and generally harmless so we could not believe this was happening to our beautiful baby daughter. It was the longest six hours of our lives. We were informed that during the operation our baby would have to go on an ecmo machine which would take over the function of her whole body and could cause a risk of brain damage so we were desperately worried”.

Thankfully, the operation seemed successful and Tiana was placed in the cardiac intensive care unit where doctors could closely monitor her recovery, however over the following few weeks her condition deteriorated and doctors announced that she would have to have another major heart operation as the first operation to repair the Alcapa had actually worsened her condition.

The second operation was a success and on April 14th, nearly six weeks after she arrived at Great Ormond Street, baby Tiana was given the thumbs-up to be transferred to her local hospital in Norfolk to continue her recovery.  Her recovery was slow due to the time it took for her to gain a health body weight, but just over a month later Tiana was allowed home. Lisa and Kevin had to administer her drugs and she still had her nasal gastric feeding tube going into her tummy, but she seemed to be strong and was making a healthy recovery at home.

In this picture: Tiana's brave brother Dylan visiting her in hospital following her operation

Lisa and Kevin could finally see a light at the end of the tunnel and were looking forward to their daughters’ recovery when they were hit with yet another blow. After 3 days Tiana suddenly fell ill and was re-admitted to hospital with a tummy bug called Rotavirus. She became de-hydrated and was moved to a high dependency unit in the hospital.

Being a strong little fighter, she began to recover and was soon taking her bottles well enough to have the tube removed ready for home.

In this picture: Tiana at home