'Miracle baby' with rare condition beats the odds

WHEN Jess Roberts and her husband Harry went for their 20-week pregnancy scan just before Christmas 2022, they expected to see a healthy baby and planned to share the gender reveal with family over the holidays.

- ABBIE WIGHTWICK

Instead, the couple from Penarth were told their unborn daughter had significant heart defects.

"I was wearing a Christmas jumper," Jess recalls. "It somehow made the moment feel even more surreal and heartbreaking."

With no history of heart conditions in either family, the diagnosis came as a complete shock. A week later, the foetal cardiology team at the University Hospital Wales confirmed that their unborn baby had tetralogy of fallot, a complex congenital heart defect affecting just 200-400 live births per million.

There was no family history of the condition, which affects how the heart works and how blood flows through it, and it seemed their unborn baby was affected at random, says Jess, who works as a teacher in Cardiff.

When Marla was born at 37 weeks in April 2023 at UHW, things looked promising. But during a routine scan the next day Marla's cardiologist wasn't sure how she was breathing unaided.

The tiny newborn was moved from Cardiff to Bristol Children's Hospital and placed in intensive care. A CT scan revealed no ducts in her heart - meaning she was breathing unaided against all odds.

"They called her a miracle baby," Jess says. "She shouldn't have been okay, but she was."

At just 19 days old, Marla underwent her first open-heart surgery. Two days later, as doctors prepared to remove her ventilator, Marla suffered a pulmonary haemorrhage.