Lana-Louise Donald

OUR DESERT ROSE......

Lana-Louise Donald...
28-12-2005 - 17-08-2006...
8 Months old...

A short story: An 8 month story:
You may not want to read....

Poor Little Lana entered this world in a not so nice way. She was diagnosed with a Diaphragmatic Hernia at her 24 weeks scan. Being our first child, we didn't have a clue what it was. So soon after she was diagnosed i searched the net and booked appointments with specialists for this problem. A diaphragmatic hernia is a hole in the diaphragm, This can cause your intestines, kidneys etc to grow in your chest which will not allow the lung/s to grow and fully function. Now there's 2 sides to this, A bad and a Good. No in between. The specialists offered us an abortion, but there is no way we could ever do that. We knew the risks and we took them on board. For weeks and weeks before the pregnancy, Mummy and Lana were carefully watched. Lana was growing well... All nurses etc were very impressed with her lung to head ratio. They thought she would make it, but there was always that chance.
Finally the day of arrival came.. Something i, Daddy looked forward to. Things where going well until Lana got distressed and led on her side... She wouldn't come out, so an emergency cesarean was performed.. Scary stuff!!
Everything was great... She had to be on a ventilator to help her lungs. She was doing really well and was going to get transported to another hospital so an operation could be done. For some unknown reason, maybe secretions, a nurse decided to change the tube that entered her lungs from the ventilator. She obviously didn't have steady enough hands as she punctured Lana's lung. She died instantly. She had heart massages for a while and she came back. :)
Well everything went fine for the next few weeks.. She slowly got better but was still very poorly. She was soon transported and a while after, after plenty of thought from the surgeons she had the op. It was a go now while we have this opportunity or she may get worse. She made it. The surgeons were very impressed at how stable she was. Unfortunately due to the heart failure she received some brain damage. Nothing was ever going to stop us from being the best parents we could. Any way, after months of living in a hospital miles away from home, we were going home, to our local hospital. Don't know why as they were useless. So we decided to take her home as we had the appropriate training to care for her. Being home felt so good. Lana was very hard work. She had to be fed through a tube that entered her nose to stomach, and had to have tons of medicine. Very rare she slept at night. Mummy was great, she was so strong, She did alot of Lana's caring as i was working almost 6 days a week.. We had around 2/3 months at home, with doctors etc interfering. This really begun to do my head in as they wasn't doing anything... They weren't helping the situation. Then one day she started to breath rapidly.. We wasn't sure what she was doing so we went to the doctors. We really didn't want to go to the hospital as we were so sick of them. The doctor said get to the hospital as soon as possible. We took her (2pm). She had an Xray. Her good lung, other was half the size, had pneumonia. This was causing her to breath so fast as she was working harder to breath. Her poor little face... Her eyes were twitching open as if she didn't want to go to sleep. About 7pm, I took her out of her bed and gave her to Mummy. Mummy spoke to her and whispered something. Then Daddy got her. I whispered something also. I whispered "I will always love you, You have held on so much, your so strong. Its Ok for you to go...." As soon as i finished that sentence, I felt something... So did Helen (Mummy) as she was holding her hand.. She went to sleep.... She looked so peaceful.

It was hard to watch her go, But it was also hard for us to watch her suffer. 8 months was enough time for us to realize her life was hard, and would only get worse. She was such a beautiful girl.... We miss her so much...

Sorry if it all doesn't make sense. I wanted to tell you our story, but 8 months of craziness is hard to shorten.. We look back and think if we could turn back time, we would definitely go through with it again. We would of tried even harder to make her short life even better.

Lana-Louise... Mummy and Daddy love you so much... We all miss you immensely.
You even have a baby brother, Logan.. Looks just like you :)

Thinking about you everyday... :) Loving you always

Mummy and Daddy.. x x x x x x







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Lana-Lousie-DHDonations@live.com
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