It’s no surprise that thriving toddler Emi King lifts everyone’s spirits – because surgeons inserted a balloon in her heart to save her life when she was two hours old.
In fact, Emi – who is now 17 months old – is the youngest patient in Britain to have had the procedure.
Despite being born with life-threatening heart problems, she has finally taken her first steps – to the delight of mum Louise King, 30, and her husband Oliver, 38.
Her parents, who live in Rochester, Kent, with Emi and Aria, three, and Sophia, seven, said: ‘She’s climbing everywhere, and her sisters dote on her. They tell her the scar on her chest is her bravery scar!’
Emi’s condition was discovered during a 12-week scan, when her heart was the size of a grain of rice.
The opening between her two upper heart chambers was far too small to allow blood flow – a condition so serious that doctors said it meant she wouldn’t survive.
Further investigation later in the pregnancy revealed she was suffering from another condition, transposition of the great arteries, in which the heart’s two main blood vessels are the wrong way round.
Because of the severity of the first condition, the couple were offered a termination – but they refused.
They were told there was only one slim chance to save Emi – to temporarily insert a balloon in her heart to widen the narrow opening.
Surgeons operated just two hours after Emi was born at St Thomas’ Hospital in London in August 2022.
Mrs King, who began working at the children’s heart charity Tiny Tickers after Emi recovered, said: ‘The hole was so tiny that doctors worried she wouldn’t survive the time it took to have a natural birth, so Emi had to be born by caesarean.’
Emi went on to have open heart surgery when she was six days old to switch her arteries around.
Despite needing five days on a ventilator for a collapsed lung, Emi survived – and is now going from strength to strength.
Dr Joyce Lim, consultant cardiologist at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool, said the op was ‘a big challenge’, adding: ‘It couldn’t be done quicker than two hours old.’
