Thriving, the little girl who had 1,000 fits in her first six weeks
BABY Penny Mylchreest was just hours old when she suffered her first seizure.
It was just the start of a staggering 1,000 epileptic fits the newborn endured in the first six weeks of her life, leaving her parents fearing for her future.
‘Each fit started with a horrific, gutwrenching scream,’ Becky Mylchreest said. ‘Her body convulsed and shook, her eyes rolled back and her head fell to one side, before she became totally still, it was so upsetting to see.’
Doctors realised they were in a race against time to stop Penny’s brain being irrevocably damaged.
Her condition came as a huge shock to Mrs Mylchreest, who had had a normal pregnancy and birth via a planned Caesarean section on March 17, 2014.
But the following day, as Mrs Mylchreest, 34, and her commercial manager husband, Andy, 43, from Ness, Wirral, prepared to take Penny home for the first time, she had her first fit.
‘I noticed Penny had gone stiff and turned a funny colour,’ Mrs Mylchreest said. ‘She’d gone blue. My heart was in my mouth as I shouted to a midwife to pick her up. I was in total shock, it didn’t seem real.’
Midwives at Arrowe Park Hospital, Wirral, assumed the baby had mucus in her throat from birth, but half an hour later she had a second seizure.
Penny was rushed to the neo-natal unit, before being transferred to Alder Hey Children’s Hospital for tests.
In the first six weeks of her life, the newborn suffered up to 30 fits a day. Doctors realised they had to work quickly to find out what was behind the terrifying seizures to stop them causing too much damage to her brain. Penny was eventually diagnosed with benign familial neonatal seizures, a rare condition which affects just one in 100,000 babies that is caused by a mutation of the potassium gene.
Several forms of medication were tried but none had any success.
Then, aged six weeks, doctors tried Penny on phenytoin, a drug which works by switching off the brain activity that causes the fits.
Now aged three, she has not suffered a single convulsion since and doctors are now hopeful she will grow out of her epilepsy and stop taking medication.
Although Penny’s speech and physical development have been damaged, she uses sign language to communicate and has physiotherapy. Her parents, who also have a four-year-old daughter, Harriet, hope she will be able to catch up with her peers.
Last night Mrs Mylchreest, a full-time mother, said: ‘There were times we wondered whether she would survive.
‘Yet now, when I look at my beautiful daughter who wins everyone over with her killer smile, it is nothing short of magical.’