When All They Had Was Love

Doctors gave Leah Church, who was born with a huge, misshapen head filled with fluid, little chance of survival. But Sandy and Tim Church refused to give up on their little girl

- Katie McCabe

SANDY CHURCH WAS DESPERATE for a glimpse of her newborn daughter. But when her wheelchair was rolled past the high windows of the Intensive Care Nursery, every shade was drawn.

"How sick is she, Tim?" Sandy asked her husband. Up from her memory rose the sound of the doctor's whispered "Oh, no," when he saw the baby's enlarged head on ultrasound. Seconds after Leah's birth, the nurse had whisked the baby away, and Sandy had been too groggy with painkillers to demand an explanation.

For 24 hours after her emergency caesarean, she was delirious with fever from a massive pelvic infection. Where is Leah? she wondered frantically.

Now as she and her husband approached the nursery entrance, Sandy shivered, “Her head is just a little bit big, isn't it, Tim?" she asked, fighting panic. Her tall, fair husband was silent as they moved past a row of incubators and came slowly to a standstill.

There, in the incubator before her, lay a tiny baby girl smothered in a maze of tubes. Her head was so enlarged that her ears were pushed down on to her neck.

"No! No!" Sandy whispered. She was ashamed to speak aloud the thought that rushed into her mind: She can't be mine. Tim, white-faced and mute, took her hand. “What on earth is wrong with her?" Sandy wailed.

"HYDROCEPHALUS". ONE OF THE attending physicians spoke the word to Tim and Sandy that afternoon. “We don't know exactly why, but in some babies the brain's normal drainage system shuts down before birth. Fluid accumulates in the head and compresses the brain tissue. Your baby has the worst case I've ever seen."

The doctor told them the baby could die. Sandy fought back tears.

"But if she should live?" Tim asked.

"From what we can tell, she would have very little chance for anything beyond a vegetative existence."