Matt’s daughter Amalie was born with a hole in her heart (Picture: Matt Roberts)
Matt Roberts didn’t know whether his youngest daughter, 4-year-old Amalie, would make it to her first birthday after requiring open heart surgery just weeks into being born.
The 40-year-old father-of-three and his wife, Sophie, 43, were told by doctors at Amalie’s 20-week scan that she would be born with both a hole in her heart – known as a Ventricular Septal Defect – as well as a rare form of congenital heart disease.
Amalie was Matt and Sophie’s third child, and so the couple felt ‘very relaxed’ going into the scan as they’d ‘done it before and knew what was coming.’
‘In fact, we were so excited that we decided to bring the kids along, so they could take a look at the scan of their new baby sister,’ Matt recalls.
‘When we arrived, everything went to plan. The nurse first saw Sophie and got her settled while I waited with the kids. But five or 10 minutes went by and they still hadn’t called us in – and it was at that point that I started to fear that something might be up.
At that point, Matt requested to go in – which he was permitted to do, but without the kids. There, they sat both him and Sophie down and delivered the news.
‘The appointment was only two days later, but those two days were agony. We had no idea what was going to happen and couldn’t help ourselves but spend every waking hour looking online to understand the condition that Amalie might have,’ Matt adds.
‘When they delivered the full diagnosis, we just had this sinking feeling. We didn’t know whether Amalie would survive.’
Amalie is now weeks away from celebrating her fifth birthday (Picture: Matt Roberts)
The severity of Amalie’s condition meant that without intervention she might not have lived longer than a month, but thanks to life-changing work by the British Heart Foundation (BHF), Amalie is now a healthy and happy four-year-old, who has just started primary school.
On her pregnancy with Amalie, Sophie notes that it was ‘very different’ to anything she’d previously experienced, noting that ‘as we approached Amalie’s due date, we had more frequent check-ins to assess the best treatment strategy for when she was born.’
‘They knew that they had to operate from the moment they found out about the defect. However, it wasn’t until the birth itself that they could work out the process was pre-surgery,’ Sophie shares.
When it came to the birth, the couple were ‘frightened’ but felt ‘in safe hands.’ Amalie was Sophie’s third C-section, as she’d previously had an emergency C-section for her first child and then a planned for her second – but this time around, there were 15 members of staff present.
‘It sounds frightening, but they all made us feel really at ease. They were so calm and professional,’ Sophie notes.
‘Without doubt, the hardest part of Amalie’s arrival into the world was the moments after the birth …read more
Source:: Metro
