‘I Looked At The Monitor Just After Putting Her Down And She Turned Blue, I Was Left In Shock- Touching Story

When Khiaya fell pregnant with her first child naturally, it was the miracle she had long feared would never happen.

The Sydney mum had her left ovary removed at just seven years old and was diagnosed with PCOS at 23.

Then, after four years of trying, she and partner Adam finally received the news they were waiting for – but heartbreakingly, it came six months after Khiaya’s mother was killed in a car crash where she was a backseat passenger.

While she was initially elated to be expecting, Khiaya was plagued by crippling thoughts that she would suffer another tragedy.

“I was very scared to lose something again”
“I felt like I wasn’t going to have her,” the 29-year-old, who even purchased a doppler for reassurance in addition to having her scheduled scans, tells Kidspot of her baby girl.

“I felt like something was going to happen and she wasn’t going to make it. I was very scared to lose something again.”

Until the final trimester, Khiaya’s pregnancy went as well as she could have hoped, with all scans showing she would have a healthy baby girl without complications.

Then, at 39 weeks, after being admitted to hospital for reduced movements, Khiaya delivered her daughter, Callie, via induction purely as a precaution, as nothing appeared to be amiss.

“When she came out, I expected a scream, but her cries were very quiet,” Khiaya, who was able to take her newborn home at five days old, remembers.

“But she was okay, so no one was worried.”

“I knew something more was going on”
Neither she or the hospital team could have predicted what would happen in baby Callie’s first year of life.

At three weeks, Khiaya took Callie to her GP and then to hospital after noticing her baby was congested and very unsettled.

“She wasn’t sleeping, she was screaming constantly and wouldn’t feed.”

The newborn was sent home with a feeding tube and Khiaya was left wondering what was really wrong.

“I knew something more was going on… it wasn’t that she was hungry and couldn’t feed – what worried me is that she didn’t want to.”

“She had turned blue and was very pale”
At nine weeks, after vomiting following a feed, Callie fell asleep.

“I went to put the Owlet monitor in its base and went back to check on her and she had turned blue and was very pale around her lips,” Khiaya remembers vividly.

“I was hysterical. I was freaking out. There was no connection in her eyes to anything around her. I thought I had lost her. None of it was sinking in.”

Incredibly, Callie was still breathing, but that incident would turn out to only be the beginning of her life-threatening health battle.

Callie was not only diagnosed with an enlarged heart that had just 30 percent function but tragically, she would also have Turner syndrome, a rare chromosomal disorder that affects only females, which can result in delayed puberty, infertility, heart defects and learning disabilities. The genetic condition is completely spontaneous.

To add to their concerns, Callie’s strain is the even rarer Mosaic Turner syndrome with large ring type X. Only one percent of pregnancies with this genetic disorder survive to birth.

“I broke down – I was crying hysterically. The whole world had turned upside down.”

“I just wanted her to survive”
Khiaya was also crushed by the reality that Turner syndrome is also life-limiting for those who have heart or kidney complications, which her daughter was already suffering from.

“I just wanted her to survive – everything else we would have to deal with later.”

After Callie survived a gruelling open heart operation at three months old, Khiaya went to sleep thinking that the worst was surely over… it wasn’t.

She and Adam were woken in the middle of the night to see their beloved daughter being revived by a room full of doctors.

“One was doing CPR and her chest was still open from the nursery,” she says softly.

“We didn’t know what was happening. It was so scary. I asked the nurse, ‘Is she going to be okay?’ And that was the first time in this whole journey where someone said, ‘I don’t know. I can’t tell you that’. I just slumped on the floor listening to them work on her and crying. I couldn’t even bring my body to sit on the seat they had given us.”

After 57 minutes of CPR, Callie couldn’t breathe on her own so was put on a heart and lung bypass as her one last chance, where she remained for 15 days.

“She’s the most caring little girl”
Miraculously, the baby girl escaped any brain damage on life support and would recover enough to return home to her loving parents.

Since then, with the help of multiple therapies and a determination like no other, Callie has gone from strength to strength, despite having low muscle tone and a speech delay. Her heart function is also that of a normal child her age.

“We didn’t know if she would ever walk, but she did that when she was almost two,” her proud mum smiles.

“We were told she would never talk and would need sign language. Now she walks, talks, jumps and sings.”

Each and every day, the mum-of-two never forgets just how much her daughter has defied the odds, and will forever be the bravest person she’ll ever meet.

To be going to kindy and doing all the things she’s doing is actually unbelievable,” she smiles.

“She’s the most caring – and sassy – little girl. She loves being friends with everyone and has no fear. She is injected with needles and takes hormones as part of her daily life, and yet she doesn’t let anything get her down. She’s superhuman.”