Echoes of the future
- About 4,600 children are born with a heart defect every year in the UK.
- The BHF have invested £1.7 million in the echo training initiative since 2000.
- Patients attending 17 hospitals have benefited from the scheme to date.
Echoes of the future
“We found out that Lily had heart problems during a routine scan when I was 10 weeks pregnant. She had a rare heart condition that would need open-heart surgery, which I was told that, on a baby, is extremely fiddly. It turned out that Lily had to go through three operations in five months to try and replace a damaged heart valve. The first two attempts failed. Before the third operation the surgeon prepared me for the worst – if he couldn’t repair the valve successfully, Lily would only have a 4% chance of survival.
Then, at the start of the third operation, Debbie Rawlins, a BHF echo technician, scanned Lily’s heart and helped our surgeon see that another repair might just be possible. It was a terrible time and the wait was dreadful, but it worked! Lily has made a lot of progress in the last two years and is doing really well. She’s a normal happy child – full of beans. She’s at pre-school now and absolutely loves it! I’m really grateful to all the BHF fundraisers that make Debbie’s job possible. We were so lucky and if it wasn’t for that echocardiogram we might not be here today.”
Ann Micallef, Lily’s mum