Abandoned Nicela’s life of love
Nicela, who was abandoned soon after birth, has found a life of love and happiness
SHE’S a wild little whirlwind, tearing around the house on a bright red 4x4 toy car, tooting the horn, revving the engine and pressing the brake just before she hits the security gate. Nicela Naudé breaks into peals of laughter but her dad’s nerves are jangling. “Slowly, slowly – your arm!” he warns.
But the four-year-old is having none of it. She moves onto the karaoke machine, improvising the lyrics to a pop song that’s playing before breaking into a loud rendition of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.
It’s exhausting just watching her – but making her energy all the more remarkable is the fact she had major surgery to remove a growth on her arm just two days ago. A 35cm scar is hidden under bandages but nothing stops her from enjoying every second of every day.
“She keeps us on our toes,” mom Madelaine (46) says. “We go to bed tired every night!”
We’re catching up with the tot we last visited three years ago (YOU, 16 July 2015), soon after she had surgery to remove most of a 1kg, dinner plate-size mass – a growth that threatened to smother her at birth as it was pressing on her lungs and airways.
Nikki has Klippel-Trénaunay syndrome, a rare congenital condition affecting only one in 100 000 babies worldwide. It affects the development of blood vessels and soft tissue such as skin and muscle, causing abnormal growths and malformation of veins.
Nikki was abandoned in hospital as a newborn and more than 80 potential adoptive parents hadn’t been up to the task of caring for a baby who’d need untold operations to make her as “normal” as possible – if she survived at all.
At one stage doctors believed she wouldn’t live beyond four months.
But then the Naudés met her – and it was love at first sight. Four years on, they’ve nurtured Nikki into the self-confident, outgoing little girl she is today.
It’s clear who rules the roost in the Naudé home in Bothasig, Cape Town: self-proclaimed Princess Nicela.
Jacques (45), a policeman, doesn’t stand a chance in this house – pink is the dominant colour and even a kiddie’s chair emblazoned with the Blue Bulls logo is bright pink.
Nikki is quite the social media queen too. “I checked her Facebook page this morning – there are 12 388 followers now,” Jacques says proudly.
Madelaine, a police clerk, keeps a diary and pictures of Nikki’s journey and shares them on Facebook so one day
she’d be able to show her how many people cared about her when she was little.
One of her biggest fans is Rikus Kleinsmidt (23), Madelaine’s son from a previous relationship, who loves spending time with his little sister and taking her to the beach.
“She was born without love, that’s why we shower her with it,” Jacques says.
Madelaine smiles. “She wakes up with a smile every morning.”
WHEN she was born on 16 March 2014 Nicela’s biological mom hadn’t even asked if her newborn was a boy or a girl before she abandoned her at a Cape Town hospital, Jacques says. Hospital staff had to track down the woman on Facebook to get her to sign the paperwork for her child to be adopted.
The Naudés met their new daughter on 6 April at the home of a friend who’d been fostering the baby girl.
“It was love at first sight,” Jacques recalls. Halfway home he and Madelaine both felt as if they’d left something behind. It was Nicela – a name Jacques later picked for the little girl because it’s just as unique as she is.
Because of her condition Nicela’s left hand was much larger than her right and soon after birth her left arm began to contort behind her back. She also struggled to breathe because of the growth on her chest.
In May 2016 four of the fingers on her left hand were operated on to make them smaller and more similar in appearance to the fingers on her right. After a three-hour surgery she was left with 20 stitches on each finger.
Four months later her hand started turning blue, her ring finger turned black and the skin started cracking open where the stitches had been.
“It was alarming,” Jacques says. The couple were terrified Nikki would lose her fingers. As with her previous surgeries, plastic and reconstructive surgeon Professor Frank Graewe led the team of surgeons at Mediclinic Louis Leipoldt in Bellville.
He opened up the fingers, removed the clotted blood and cleaned the wounds before closing the fingers up again.
Nikki’s digits have healed well and she’s able to build puzzles and put money in her piggy bank with her right hand. She still instinctively favours her right arm – that much is clear as she races around in her red 4x4.
“It was her Christmas present,” Jacques says. “She wanted a car just like Mom and Dad.”
Nikki goes to a small private preschool to minimise the risk of her getting hurt – a bigger school with lots of kids in the playground was too much of a danger, her parents felt.
But she’s a strong kid and tolerates her condition well.
And she hasn’t asked for pain medication once since her latest op, her proud parents say.
Jacques, on the other hand, is a big softie and often bursts into tears when he can see his daughter is suffering.
“It feels like I’m the one who’s hurting!” he says.
FOR a while Nikki had to wear a special orthopaedic helmet for 23 hours a day to help her skull grow as it should. She was also born with plagiocephaly – a condition in which a baby’s neck muscles are too tight, causing the head to grow skew. Because she was born two weeks overdue and because of the large growth on her body, there wasn’t enough space in the womb and too much pressure was put on her skull. But the helmet did the trick and her head, covered in a glorious halo of brown curls, shows no sign of plagiocephaly. “Still, we expect she’ll need intermittent plastic surgery for the rest of her life,” Madelaine says. Nikki will need an operation to her breast area to ensure she develops properly, another part of the growth – over her right rib cage – needs to be removed and her fingers will also need to be operated on again in future. Nikki knows she’s adopted and proudly tells us her mommy fetched her from the hospital. Jacques smiles at his little girl. “Someone asked me on Facebook why I hadn’t adopted a ‘normal’ child as my first child,” he says. “But just look at her.”