After a low-risk, uneventful pregnancy, Vivian made her debut into our family via emergency c-section in June and spent the first month of her life in hospital in Christchurch Women's NICU.

Vivian suffered perinatal asphyxia at birth from severe meconium aspiration. When she was born she could not breathe on her own and doctors had trouble finding a heartbeat. She received extensive suctioning and was placed on a cooling system for the first three days of her life to protect her brain, intubated, and hooked up to BRAINZ monitors. She suffered some seizures in her early days and has been on anti-seizure medication since then.

Against the odds, Vivian's lungs began working on their own and most of her organs overcame the shock she suffered from oxygen deprivation. She had an MRI done when she was just a week old and it showed damage to most parts of her brain. Despite all of this, she is bright eyed and alert. If you looked at her you wouldn't know anything was different behind her little smile. We won't know a lot of what this means for Vivian until she grows up, but we are hoping that she will continue to surprise the doctors and keep beating odds.

This week Vivian started having some new seizures and doctors have confirmed that it looks like Vivian is having infantile spasms, a pretty rare form of epilepsy that presents in infants. Unfortunately it can be easily missed and we are lucky that we videoed the seizures for doctors to see. We hope to know more soon.

We may need to take a more aggressive approach to treating her condition if her current medication doesn't work. We're not sure at this time what this will entail, or if we will have to travel to Auckland in the near future to pursue private treatment for Vivian on our own, but we expect a long road ahead of us.

While Vivian was in hospital, her father was unable to work, and so we have gone through most of our savings. We're starting this fund to help cover ongoing expenses for medical treatment, transportation, therapy & educational needs she might have in the future.

Thank you so much for reading.