Azeem Zander, 18-months-old

“Do your best to keep positive and remember that sometimes, relying too much on what you read could end up with you worrying too much. So, keep calm and trust that everything will work out.”

 

When we were expecting our first child, we had all our routine checkups done but we did not detect there was anything actually wrong with him. There weren’t any complications.

But on the day of his delivery, we saw that he was actually having some trouble breathing. We could actually see his skin becoming blue. We were like ‘What’s wrong?’ All that was running through my head was ‘What did we do wrong?’

We found out that our first-born had this transposition of great arteries (TGA), which is part of the congenital heart disorder. He needed a hole to be poked into his heart so that he could breathe easily.

I remember it being a race against time and we needed to move quickly.

 

So, Azeem had the procedure done and once he was stabilised, that was when the real healing started.

We were in the hospital for about a month. We thought the arrival of Azeem would be like any other first-time parents’: surrounded by family at home.

Instead, we were alone in a hospital not knowing what was going to happen.

Later on, we learnt one of our colleague’s sister gave birth to one of her kids who had the exact same condition as our son.

That kid is 30-years-old now. Knowing this actually gave us hope that our son could grow up normally. He might not become an Olympian but I’m not an Olympian either, so it’s alright.

 

My advice to other parents who might be going through the same experience as us is to just give the best for your kid, and have faith.

Do your best to keep positive and remember that sometimes, relying too much on what you read could end up with you worrying too much. So, keep calm and trust that everything will work out.