Baby, you’re a little miracle!
Published: September 28, 2005
IT’S a special time for any new parents – bringing their new little bundle of joy home from hospital, writes Glen Cooper.
But for Barry and Lindsey Dyson, carrying daughter Imogen over the doorstep was the happy conclusion to a year of emotional turmoil.
Millions of ITV viewers saw the Torrisholme couple featured in the prime time documentary ‘Precious Babies’ in March which followed their attempts to conceive through IVF treatment.
They had been trying for a baby since they got married in 1997 and turned to IVF three years later when nothing had happened.
The programme showed how one attempt failed but Lindsey became pregnant at the second try, but that was only the start of the story.
At their 20 week scan Barry and Lindsey were told by the radiographer that he was having difficulty checking the baby’s internal organs because ‘it’ (they didn’t want to know the sex) was curling up in the womb. They were asked to wait outside.
When they were called back in a senior radiographer was also in the ultrasound room.
“It was around Christmas and we were all excited about seeing the baby kicking,” said Barry. “But as soon as we walked back in the room we knew there was something wrong and our hearts sunk. We were told the baby didn’t have a properly formed diaphragm and its intestines were growing up into the chest cavity, impeding lung development. The heart was on the wrong side as well.”
A trip to St Mary’s Hospital, Manchester was arranged and the couple were given the full detail of their baby’s problems – detail that, in their words, ‘knocked them for six’.
A diaphragmatic hernia was diagnosed and any excitement they’d felt at the impending birth of their longed-for child was blown away with the news that survival chances were less than 40%.
Lindsey said: “We tried to stay positive because we knew that IVF only has a 20% chance of success anyway and we’d come this far.
“We told ITV that we didn’t want our baby’s problems to be part of the TV programme. It had absolutely nothing to do with the IVF and we didn’t want to put other couples off. This was a purely random problem that only affects one in two or three thousand babies and not normally so severely.”
From then there was none of the usual eager anticipation for the Dysons about the birth, only worry and anxiety every day.
“We knew that inside me the baby was safer – when she was born it would be touch and go, with the odds on her not surviving,” said Lindsey.
When baby Imogen finally emerged – taking the couple by surprise on the night of April 9 and delivered by emergency section after becoming distressed – the news was even worse.
Staff at the Royal Lancaster Infirmary kept the 4lb tot alive in an incubator until she was whisked away back to St Mary’s and into intensive care. The Dysons were told her condition was more critical than thought and that her chances of surviving the night didn’t reach double
figures. The following morning, after an unbearable night, they were taken aside and advised that, if they were minded to have Imogen Christened, they should do it there and then as she wouldn’t see the end of the day.
They were inconsolable.
The baby they’d so desired and whom they’d struggled for years to conceive was to be cruelly taken from them before they’d even had chance to hold her.
“But she kept battling on,” said Barry, “she refused to let go and showed a natural determination to live.”
Imogen was paralysed and oblivious to her problems but was kept alive on a ventilator, her parents just waiting for the moment they would have to accept the inevitable.
One day after three weeks she showed very slight signs of improvement. Mum and dad’s hopes were briefly lifted, only to be shattered at 5am next morning when they were woken by a nurse urging them to come to see their baby.
She had deteriorated severely in the night – her one working lung had collapsed and they should take the chance now to have their first cuddle before saying goodbye. The nurse would bring them a comfy chair.
A doctor arrived for one last assessment and decided to take an x-ray. That was when the lung problem was discovered and an emergency operation was set up at the incubator – Imogen being too frail to be moved.
Thirty minutes later the surgeon emerged and his beaming grin told it all. She was back.
Barry said: “He couldn’t believe she’d pulled through, saying he’d never known a baby survive with such problems.”
Blood transfusions and other treatment filled the next four weeks as well as an operation to encourage her diaphragm rim to grow and form properly.
She was later transferred back to Lancaster’s neonatal unit and, at five months old and weighing 10lbs, Imogen Neive Dyson is now home in Torrisholme, swamped by cards, balloons, toys and, of course, lots of love.
Lindsey said: “All the hospital staff have been fantastic. St Mary’s kept her alive, she wouldn’t be with us but for their help and that of the people at Lancaster. We’re having a blessing for her shortly and some of the medical staff will be there. They’ll be happy to see her again, they were in tears when we left.”
Barry added: “We’ve had a lot to do because we never bought a pram or a cot or finished the nursery because we knew there was a good chance she wouldn’t be coming home and the upset would have been even more difficult to bear. She has to have oxygen all the time but we hope her lungs may start to develop and she can enjoy life as she grows up. She’s our little miracle.”
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