A Dundee baby whose brain was starved of oxygen for seven minutes after birth is making a miraculous recovery after doctors “froze” her for three days.
Louise Jones and Graeme Bathie’s daughter Freya was born full-term in October but complications set in after the birth and she stopped breathing.
Doctors at Ninewells Hospital recommended a new treatment for the baby controlled therapeutic hypothermia.
This reduces a baby’s body temperature from 37C to 33.5C for 72 hours.
Evidence has shown that this can increase the chance of the baby’s survival and reduce the risks or severity of brain damage or other disabilities.
Although the treatment has been offered in Glasgow and Edinburgh for some time, it was only introduced at Ninewells in October and Freya is the first baby to benefit.
Louise and Graeme said the trauma of her first two weeks of life now seems like a distant nightmare.
“I don’t know what happened the hospital is still looking into it,” said Louise (30), who was in labour for 32 hours.
Louise added, “Freya wasn’t breathing and her heart had stopped. They took her away and resuscitated her but she was without oxygen for about seven minutes.”
Graeme said it was apparent something was seriously wrong with Freya as soon as she had been delivered.
“The room went from being very calm to there being a sense of controlled chaos,” he said.Amazing recoveryDoctors recommended inducing hypothermia in Freya five hours after her birth, but even they were unsure how successful the treatment would be.
The couple were even asked if doctors should re-intubate Freya if she was unable to breathe on her own once the tubes that were breathing for her were removed.
“Most of the time she was just lying there but the doctors were coming backwards and forwards to give us updates about how they felt the treatment was going,” Louise said.
After being cooled for three days, Freya was slowly warmed up back to her normal temperature over a period of 12 hours.
Doctors carried out an MRI scan, but warned that they could not detect any brain activity.
However, the couple noticed a major improvement in Freya’s condition almost immediately once she began to warm up.
“When she was being cooled there wasn’t much movement because she was essentially frozen but once they started warming her up it almost seemed to happen overnight she became a different baby, and started moving her hands and feet,” Louise said.
Amazingly, Freya not only started to breathe on her own, she was also able to swallow food, which doctors had also feared she would be unable to do.
It was four days after her birth before her mother was able to hold her for the first time and doctors feared she would not survive.
Freya was allowed to leave hospital after 13 days.
Although doctors have warned there may still be some brain damage and that her left side is weaker than it should be, Graeme and Louise said she acts like any other five-month-old baby.
An NHS Tayside spokeswoman said three babies, including Freya, have been given therapeutic hypothermia since October and that they expect to treat around 10 babies from across the region each year.