Hello everyone,

Some of you may already know and to some of you this will be news, on the 12th March George and I welcomed our beautiful baby girl Isabella Wendy Ann Maddock into the world. She was very premature at only 25 weeks, weighing 1lb 4oz at the John Radcliff Hospital in Oxford.

After 132 days in hospital I am happy to tell you all that we are now home and enjoying our family life together with our little miracle.

From the day she was born until the day we brought her home we stayed by her side. We lived in the amazing charity run Ronald McDonald House which is on hospital grounds and allows parents with very poorly children to stay close by. Without the Ronald McDonald House George & I don’t know what we would have done. We are incredibly grateful to all the wonderful staff at “The Ronald”.

The nurses, doctors, consultants, surgeons and support teams at The Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) are simply the best. The care they provide is of the very highest standard and something we appreciated every day. They allowed us the much needed respite knowing that our precious girl was in the safest hands possible.

Isabella is an incredible little lady, a true warrior. She has been through a tremendous ordeal with 5 brain surgeries and 1 abdominal surgery to name just a part of her journey over the past five months.

The one thing that got us through the tough days of many, many hours on the ward with Isabella was being able to sit in the specialist recliner chair provided by the hospital and holding our girl close to our hearts ‘skin to skin’. Kangaroo care is one of the most important practices within the NICU.

However! There are not enough of these chairs in the unit for all the parents to enjoy their baby’s and help them get through the tough days with the essential comfort they provided.

After personally spending every waking hour in this chair, I cannot begin to explain how important the skin to skin comfort has helped George and I to cope with the hardest few months of our lives. This has also, without a shadow of a doubt helped Isabella. I have seen it with my own eyes. She calms down, her heart rate lowers, her oxygen requirement lowers and she has a very restful sleep, helping her to grow and build her much needed strength to continue fighting.

Because of the shortage of these much valued chairs, we have decided to try and raise sufficient funds to buy an adequate amount of chairs needed for the NICU. The dream would be that every family area around each incubator in the unit has a recliner chair and a comfortable chair for their partner, plus some spares so they can be swapped out for repairs and cleaning as each of the precious delicate souls in the NICU are incredibly vulnerable so infection control is critical.

The charity SSNAP https://www.ssnap.org.uk/ who support all the parents and families and arrange funding for the unit have agreed to manage the funds and the purchase of the correct chairs. We anticipate it will take about £15,000 to fully kit out the Unit.

It’s amazing to think that something as simple as a chair can make such a difference , but it does.

We would be enormously grateful, as would NICU, for any and all donations. With your help we can make it so that these babies can receive all the benefits of “skin to skin” and also see that parents going through the darkest of times can at least enjoy some comfort and cuddles as a family.

George, Isabella and I thank you for your help and generosity.

With all our Love