Sophie's a little miracle

At 11pm on November 20, 2008, Claire Greer bent to pick something up.

The archaeologist was heavily pregnant and four days overdue with her first child, a little girl, when she realised her baby wasn’t moving.

Concerned and confused – an ultrasound two days prior revealed everything was fine – Claire immediately phoned a midwife.

Within an hour, a team of doctors were assembling at Albany Regional Hospital to perform an emergency caesarean section in the hope of saving a tiny life.

At 2am on November 21, Sophie Greer was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around her legs six times, cutting off her oxygen supply; she had no heartbeat.

Claire’s husband, Paul, a lawyer, waited anxiously outside the operating theatre; the first news the expecting parents heard of their new arrival was that she was “really, really sick”.

That the delivery took place on the same night as one of Albany’s worst storms on record didn’t help matters; the Royal Flying Doctor Service couldn’t get to Sophie until she was 12 hours old. Hospital staff worked through the night to keep her alive.

When the RFDS put her in an incubator and wheeled her to the ambulance, Claire’s bed was rolled into the corridor so she could see her daughter for the first time.

When recalling the moment, the emotions are still raw for Claire.

“I got to put my hand through the little hole in the incubator and touch her knee,” she said. “That was all I saw of her and all I got to touch of her until she was four days old.”

What happened in those four days is the extraordinary part.

While the RFDS – who didn’t have room on the plane for Claire or Paul, with so many specialists required to keep Sophie alive – journeyed to Perth, she began having seizures, one of several signs that her brain had been damaged by lack of oxygen.

Specialists at Princess Margaret Hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit used ice packs to bring the infant’s core body temperature down to 33C (the normal temperature is about 37C).

The radical cooling treatment, designed to prevent further brain damage, lasted for 72 hours.

While Paul drove to PMH and the RFDS returned to collect Claire, Sophie was put on a variety of medications to control her seizures and no one was permitted to touch her, as it caused her little body stress.

“The first time we saw her,” Claire said, “she was under this cooling treatment, cold to the touch, in a coma and puffy, and it was horrible seeing her like that.

“It was really difficult to sit beside the cot and watch her, but that was all we could do.

You have all these expectations, hopes and dreams about what your child is going to be like and what it’s going to be like to have a new baby.

“You think forward in time, all the way to them going to school.

Everything is a possibility before they’re born, and then when something like this happens, it’s taken a whole lifetime away from you before it’s even started.”

When Claire and Paul got to finally hold their little girl, she opened her eyes for the first time.

“That was the first time we started to think that it was going to be OK,” Claire said.

“Until then it had all been such a blur and such a surreal experience. We’d never heard of this cooling treatment, we’d never even heard of this brain injury.

At that point in time, we still didn’t fully understand what was going on.”

From there, Sophie was weaned off her medications and began to breast feed, both promising signs.

The Greers allowed themselves a tiny inkling of hope.

Then, when Sophie was seven days old, the results from previous EEG and MRI scans returned, and she was diagnosed with a serious brain injury called hypoxic-ischaemic encephalopathy.

The damage had been extensive, with significant areas of her brain responsible for speech, vision, movement and cognitive function affected.

There was a greater than fifty per cent chance she would have a range of disabilities, leaving the young parents facing an entirely different future than the one they had imagined.

“It immediately changed our perspective on everything.

"We started thinking about how we might have to adapt our house and our car,” Claire said.

“Then we went back and looked at her, and she wasn’t any different to the way she’d been before.

We started to realise that we couldn’t look at her in terms of her diagnosis and her prognosis, we just had to look at what she was doing, no matter what.

She was still fighting and she didn’t give up at any point, so we really couldn’t give up either.”

So began a process of much hard work for the young family.

Sophie underwent physiotherapy at Albany Regional Hospital to correct the weak muscle tone in her left side and the tight tone in her right.

The family relocated to Perth to make meeting her numerous appointments at PMH easier, and a second EEG scan when Sophie was four months old revealed an absence in seizure activity.

Soon after, Sophie’s first appearance at the Early Intervention Clinic at PMH – where her development in various areas was assessed – placed her ahead for her age group in all developmental areas except for communication and gross motor skills.

Then she learnt to crawl, chasing the family cat around the house, eliminating her previous issues with muscle tone.

And after 10 months with a speech therapist, Claire said “something just clicked.”

“She’s now nine months ahead in her language development.

Every single day she just talks more and more.

“We never thought we’d get to this point,” she said.

“It’s like all those original dreams that we had, they all ended up coming true in the end.

"It feels like we’ve been given back the life that we were hoping for. It’s great.”

Now, Claire is using her experience to help others who have lived or are living through similar scenarios.

She has just become WA co-ordinator for the Miracle Babies foundation and is in the process of establishing the international Hope for HIE foundation with two American families.

“Sophie’s really affectionate and happy and cheeky,” Claire said.

“She’s got a hilarious sense of humour, and it’s just amazing to think what we could have missed out on if we hadn’t had such good treatment from Albany Hospital and the Royal Flying Doctors and the staff at PMH.

“We owe them everything, really.”

You can find out more information on Sophie’s story, support for friends of family with similar stories or ways to donate to the cause by visiting www.miraclebabies.org.au, at sophiejourney.blogspot.com, or through the PMH Foundation.

Got a story? Email liz.newell@albanyadvertiser.com