Mum's kiss of life brings comatose 14-month-old baby back to life
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A 14-month-old girl, whom doctors said was about to die after succumbing to a virulent form of meningitis just over a month before, was saved and brought back to life by something miraculous.
The moment Jennifer Lawson was saying a final goodbye to the cherished daughter she believed was dying, was invested with a weight of unendurable sadness.
Doctors had told Jennifer there was no hope for 14-month-old Alice, as the disease had triggered kidney failure, then a catastrophic stroke. Alice lay in a coma in her hospital bed, dependent on dialysis and hooked to a ventilator.
The fragile threads that held her to life would soon be severed. Her life-support machine was about to be turned off, and a transplant team stood by. Jennifer had decided that from her daughter's premature death some good should come. Her organs would be donated to help another child live.
When her life support machine was turned off on March 24, 2010, she began to breathe on her own: her tenacious little spirit would not be vanquished.
Neither Jennifer, 31, nor Phil Lloyd, 36, could quite believe that their 14-month-old daughter had not slipped seamlessly from her coma into everlasting sleep.
"The truth did not dawn on us to begin with," the Daily Mail quoted Phil as saying.
"But then a nurse came in and said the strangest thing. She said the organ donation team were leaving; that they wouldn't be needed after all. Then a doctor came in and told us Alice was breathing without ventilation. They'd been watching her monitors in a separate room; they'd seen her rally," he said.
It is now two-and-a-half years since Alice lay on the brink of death.
Aged three-and-a-half, she is a beautiful, doll-like child with china-blue eyes, rosy cheeks and an ever-ready dazzling smile.
She lives with Jennifer, a former massage therapist, Phil, who used to run an online fancy dress shop, and her elder sister Taylor, eight, in a neat semi in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire.
Both Phil and Jennifer, who have been together for ten years, have now given up work to share the care of Alice.
The legacy of septicaemia has left her with one leg shorter than the other; she cannot yet walk unaided but is formidably tenacious.
The illness deprived her of speech, but she is learning to talk again. Her words are halting; she supplements them with sign language. When she sits on the floor, surrounded by her soft toys, her beam of pleasure lights the room.
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