A MARINE'S Toughest Battle

Doctors said there was slim hope for the baby born with only half a heart. But her father had just begun to fight.

- Robert Kiener

Lying in bed after waking from a long night's sleep in his home outside London, he smiled as he remembered the wonderful scene. In it, he had been holding his newborn daughter in his strong arms. As she looked lovingly into his eyes, he was so overcome with emotion that the tough 50-year-old former U.S. Marine had started crying. He was in love. He'd never felt this much love for anyone.

Amazing, he thought as the morning sun streamed through his windows. This was more than a dream. He threw back his covers and put on some clothes. He had to tell his partner of four years, Zofia Fenrych, what he had learned from his dream. 

Fenrych, a 40-year-old homeopathic therapist, listened to him as he told her about his dream. "You're pregnant. We're having another baby."

Fenrych laughed. They had a 2-yearold daughter, and both had 16-year-old sons from previous relationships. "No way I'm pregnant," she said.

"Honey," he said, "we are having a little girl. I saw her. And she'll be beautiful!"

To prove it, Velez zipped downstairs to the pharmacy to get a pregnancy test kit. An hour later, two red lines appeared on the test strip. Fenrych was indeed pregnant. She screamed in delight and the couple embraced.

"We're going to have a beautiful daughter," Velez said. "I know. I saw her last night."

FOUR MONTHS LATER, in February 2022, they went to the doctor's office for an ultrasound. They held hands as the sonographer moved an electronic probe called a transducer over Fenrych's abdomen. A twodimensional image of their baby, whom they had already named Dorothea, appeared on the screen.

"We saw her tiny fingers and toes and watched as baby Dorothea, my dream daughter come true, actually moved," Velez remembers. "She was sucking her thumb. Then both of us let out a shout as it looked like she waved at us. She was so tiny, so beautiful!"

Suddenly, the sonographer stopped moving.