Doctors feared she’d never walk, talk or see – but now Evie-Mae can do all three!
AT only eight months old EvieMae Geurts fell critically ill with a life-long brain condition.
Her distraught parents Amy and Martyn were told that a series of highly invasive operations could relieve her symptoms – but the damage had been done.
It meant their daughter was registered blind and they were told she would probably never learn to walk or talk.
But just sometimes a little someone confounds expectations and proves the doctors thoroughly wrong.
Today Evie-Mae does not even need glasses, she is as active as any other sevenyear-old and definitely has the gift of the gab as well as being top of her class.
Mrs Geurts, 28, said: ‘Evie is phenomenal. We’re so proud of her.
‘The doctors didn’t know if she’d ever be
‘We’re so proud of her’
able to see or walk or talk. Now, she’s ahead of her age in learning.
‘They can’t understand... She’s an amazing little girl, and so brave.’
Mrs Geurts, a full-time mother who lives in Bristol with her quarry worker husband, 49, and her two sons Archie, eight, and George, five, first took Evie-Mae to the children’s hospital in the city after a bad cold left her daughter with very red eyes in 2014.
The doctors shone a torch in them and found that she had no visual responses, and said she was blind.
A few months later Evie-Mae’s head began to swell and Mrs Geurts took her back to the doctors with concerns it could be hydrocephalus – a build-up of fluid deep within brain, in the ventricles. The condition cannot be cured and requires permanent shunts to be inserted in the brain to drain fluid and therefore relieve pressure and prevent further damage.
Mrs Guerts said: ‘I knew of hydrocephalus because my brother has it, and I thought that might be why she had no vision, but I was told I was wrong because she was a smiley baby.’
Evie-Mae was eventually diagnosed with hydrocephalus in 2015 and had a shunt fitted. Before she underwent surgery the pressure inside her skull was found to be 32 times the normal level, potentially causing huge damage to her brain.
But after Evie-Mae had a shunt fitted, she slowly started to regain vision – and from then on her progress was extraordinary.
Mrs Geurts said: ‘The doctors admitted because of a delay in diagnosis, they weren’t sure what would happen. She learnt Makaton [a type of sign language] and then eventually, she started speaking, so – amazingly – she gained vision, was signing and then speaking.’
In April 2019, Evie-Mae started getting headaches again and doctors had to drill through her skull to insert a needle.
The pressure was 40 times the expected amount, and doctors discovered her shunt was blocked, so she was fitted with a new one.
In January last year the headaches returned. But doctors discovered she was poorly again because she in fact no longer needed the shunt, which was ‘splitting’ the ventricles.
Mrs Geurts said: ‘The doctor couldn’t believe it – he thought we’d be in and out of hospital every few years because the shunts kept blocking, but it turned out that somehow she’d cured herself.
‘He said he’d never seen it before and certainly didn’t expect to see it in her.’