Family & Life Magazine Issue 12 | Page 10

FOCUS The Litmus Test of Parenthood Litmus, the latest hit A ROCKY START album of popular local The joy of pregnancy turned into indie band The Great anxiety when Magdelene started bleeding heavily seven weeks Spy Experiment, is a into pregnancy. At 32 weeks, she melodic unravelling of stopped feeling Kyra’s kicks. Ten its members’ darker days into hospital supervision, hours. For keyboardist Kyra’s heartbeat flat-lined. Magdelene was hurriedly ushered Magdelene Han and into undergoing an emergency bassist Khairyl Hashim, Caesarean birth, where the the romantically doctors worked their magic. intertwined half of the Amidst the chaos, Kyra was miraculously revived. band, it soulfully echoes of the dark hours after TATTOOED AT BIRTH giving birth to their baby The triumph of Kyra’s birth was girl Kyra. This is their short-lived. turbulent journey. She was prematurely born with a lopsided head, her delicate skin tattooed with a port wine stain indications that something was not quite right. After a series of medical examinations, Kyra was found to have pressure in her brain and Never, ever give up hope. And after all that’s done, don’t forget to YOLO! 10 Family & Life • Sep 2014 was tested for hemihypertrophy, a condition in which physical asymmetry is caused by extensive cell-growth on one side of the body. A friend and dermatologist who had seen Kyra’s red birthmark pointed out that Kyra exhibited a few symptoms of MacrocephalyCapillary Malformation (M-CM), a rare disease that has only struck 150 patients in the world. In Asia, Kyra was the only one to suffer from it; she was diagnosed at eightmonths-old. The new parents were dealt their next blow when Kyra emerged motionless from a surgery that was meant to lessen the pressure in her brain. “For two whole days, Kyra didn’t move at all when she first came out,” recalls Magdelene. “The doctor said that it might be due to the general anaesthesia but we kept waiting and she still didn’t move.” By Jade Tan Apparently, the first operation had caused major internal bleeding, resulting in a second operation to drain the blood and a third to include a shunt (a thin tube that drains excess fluid from the brain to another part of the body). Although the hardy sixmonth-old pulled through the three surgeries, done over a span of just 10 days, she was left with partially impaired psychomotor skills. During this whole period, Kyra was warded in the ICU. The perseverant couple were not allowed to stay in the unit overnight, so they would come in the morning at 8 am and only make the long trek home 14 hours later at 10 at night. Then, the process would repeat again the next day. After a month, when they had picked up the skill – and the nerve – to insert a feeding tube through their daughter’s nose, the family was eventually allowed to return to living their lives at home.