A mum told how doctors said her baby “wouldn’t make it through the weekend” – but he pulled through after more than 40 operations.

Four months into her pregnancy Megan Curran, 23, from Wavertree, Merseyside, was told her son would have a rare heart condition, tetralogy of fallot, a congenital heart defect made up of four heart problems. Lucas Quine was born in January 2021 at Liverpool Women’s Hospital and for the first nine months of his life was hooked up to machines in the ICU.

Megan said she “didn’t think” they were ever going to be able to bring their son home. She said: “We found out when I was pregnant that my little boy would have a heart condition and he was born premature.

“During the pregnancy I had been quite sick, I was vomiting all the time, couldn’t eat and when he was born he was seven weeks early. He was taken straight from me, I didn’t even get a chance to hold him because he wasn’t breathing.”

She continued: “I was told his condition was one in a million and that they’d never seen a baby born with all these conditions before. We had student nurses coming over to learn how to deal with babies like Lucas.

“It was a case of hit and miss treating him, they were trying anything because they didn’t know how to deal with it.” After he was born Lucas was transferred to Alder Hey Children’s Hospital where he spent the next nine months in the ICU, hooked up to machines and being operated on, in attempts to save his life.

Megan was told her son has less than a 15% chance of survival, reported the Liverpool Echo. She said: “I remember how delicate and fragile he was. I remember he had one operation and he’d left me looking normal and then when he returned to the ICU after his operation he was looking like a different baby, he was unrecognisable.

“He went down hill, he was getting sicker and sicker, he was full of fluids and looked swollen. He was rushed for emergency operations. Then on my first birthday and Mother’s Day as a mum they [doctors at Alder Hey] sat us down in a room and said he wouldn’t make it through the weekend. But the next weekend luckily he was still here.”

More scans were done on Lucas and it was discovered it was no longer his heart conditions causing him problems. Scans revealed his windpipe had collapsed and it was only the ventilator keeping him alive.

Megan said: “The scans showed he had fluid on his brain, it had been caused because of the amount of time he had been stuck in the ICU, it’s now caused him to have epilepsy because of it. Now he has seizures.

“He ended up getting transferred to Great Ormond Street Hospital where he had open heart surgery and his windpipe reconstructed. It was nine months he was in hospital before we were allowed to come home.

“He came home in October 2021 for the first time. Up until that moment we never thought it was something that would ever happen because we had been told so many times it was his ‘last weekend.’”

Now, looking at Lucas aged four you’d never think there was anything wrong with him, says Megan, unless you see the scars under his clothes. She said: “He is such a smiley boy, you’d never think he’d had over 40 operations – that’s more than any grown adult would ever have – and he does it with the biggest smile on his face. He is constantly getting poked and prodded by doctors and takes it like a champ. To see him live a normal happy life, is everything.”

The family even went on their first holiday to Tenerife last month to celebrate Lucas’ fourth birthday. Megan added: “I’ll never be more grateful to Alder Hey and Great Ormond Street for saving his life.”

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