I am raising money in tribute to a young girl called Bella who I first met last year and touched my heart. Here is her story told by her mum:

Isabella spent her first Christmas in hospital. I brought her in a special outfit to wear and I took her presents to put under the tree on the children’s ward.

Isabella struggled to feed when she was born. At two and a half months old she stopped drinking and lost a huge amount of weight. The doctors thought that perhaps she had reflux or a chest infection, until one day she suddenly turned blue and stopped breathing for a few seconds. For the whole of her first year she was moved to and from Southampton and Salisbury hospital while they did tests. There was quite a lot of time that I couldn’t be with her, which was very hard because I didn’t know how long it would ever be until I could take her home.

It was when she was around six months old that doctors eventually put a camera into her lungs and did a biopsy, to discover that she had chronic lung disease. I couldn’t take Isabella home until specialist equipment was available to help her breathe outside of hospital. I had to give up my job as I had very little support system around me. It was just Isabella and me.

Isabella doesn’t eat or drink - she just has her water hourly through a tube in the day time and has milk through a tube attached to her tummy during the night. She often wakes up crying because her tummy hurts where she has knocked where the tube (PEG) attaches.

She is also attached to a ventilator at night to help her breathe and the alarm sounds loudly if ever anything goes wrong. It’s scary when that happens