She is absolutely fine now, 9 years old and perfectly healthy.
When she was born she had breathing difficulties and was whisked away from my sister almost straight away which in hindsight was most likely due to poor lung development but at the time it was considered to be just one of those things that can happen in labour.
When she was a young baby she was always a poor feeder and poor to gain weight which looking back was probably because her stomach was siting beneath her lungs but that obviously wasn’t known at the time.
When she was 9 months old she started getting very lethargic, vomiting a lot and even had some blood on her vomit. She was admitted to our local hospital with suspected gastroenteritis but as the days passed she got much worse to the point she was vomiting faecal matter.
She was suspected to have a twist in her bowel so was blue lighted to a local children’s hospital but for some reason she seemed to really pick up so they discharged her without doing any investigations.
A few weeks later she started getting poorly again and this time they were blue lighted to a different children’s hospital and this is when the CDH was picked up on. She was in hospital for about 10 weeks in total and needed two large operations to repair everything.
The surgeon said it was one of the worst he’d ever seen and he had no idea how she got to 9 months old before she started to become unwell.
She does have large scars from her operations, one that runs down the length of her sternum and abdomen, and then which goes from her belly button and across to her left hip bone.
It was a very worrying time for us all but she’s absolutely fine now and loves hearing about her illness. At the age of 9 she finds it quite amusing that she was sicking up poo 