Defying odds and giving birth to 'little angel'

Defying odds and giving birth to 'little angel'

* Nick Miller
* May 4, 2009

SHORTLY before Gloria Giudice got married, she was told her serious kidney disease meant she would probably be unable to conceive — and was even less likely to carry a baby to term.

But last week the 31-year-old bucked the odds, after fighting through a gruelling pregnancy with near-daily dialysis, to give birth to her first child.

Experts at the Monash Medical Centre say little Corilina, born last Tuesday weighing a healthy 2.8 kilograms, is a medical marvel: one of only a few hundred cases on record around the world.

To Mrs Giudice, her baby is "just a little angel", and well worth all the painful hours hooked up to dialysis machines at the hospital.

"She's definitely worth it — she's beautiful," the exhausted but proud mother said.

At age three she suffered kidney disease that left the blood-filtering organs weak. She took medication to hold off the progress of the disease, but before she got married a specialist gave her bad news: malfunctioning kidneys meant her body was awash with toxins — an environment that made a successful pregnancy very difficult, perhaps impossible.

"I was pretty upset at the time," Mrs Giudice said. "But I got pregnant within two months of getting married."

Monash's director of nephrology, Professor Peter Kerr, said he had seen only a handful of such cases in his near two decades of practice.

"Renal failure is associated with infertility and pregnancies are uncommon," he said. "We were worried about the effects on the baby. There are risks such as the baby not growing very well because it is starved of blood, nasty pre-eclampsia (dangerously high blood pressure in the mother), or toxaemia (toxic blood). A lot of cases miscarry early on."

To give her the best chance of carrying the baby to term, Mrs Giudice was placed on an extraordinary regime of dialysis, in which a machine hooks into the patient's blood supply to filter out the toxins. At first three days a week, then four, then five, she came to Monash for three-to-five-hour dialysis sessions.

"It was a massive pain in the arse, to put it nicely," Mrs Giudice said. Fresh scars on her chest and bruised lumps on her arms are evidence of the ordeal. "I used to bruise a lot, I always had black marks on my arms, it was horrible. It plays with your head, you are sitting there, stuck in the hospital all the time, hooked up to a machine so you can't move, and the baby sits on your spine."

But as the pregnancy continued, the treatment kept both mother and baby healthy. At first, the obstetricians wanted to take out the baby as soon as possible: at 28 weeks. But with all signs good, they pushed back the birth to 38 weeks, avoiding the complications and risks of a premature birth.

Professor Kerr said the hospital's combination of expertise in obstetrics, pediatrics and dialysis meant Mrs Giudice got the best possible care.

But, in the end, "I think we were just lucky," he said.

http://www.theage.com.au/national/defying-odds-and-giving-birth-to-little-angel-20090503-arf9.html?page=-1