22nd July 2006.....

This morning we meet with Dane's cardiologist Jim Morwood and he told us what Dane had was an infection call Bacterial Endocarditis but they didn't yet know the exact bacterium that was attacking his heart. BE is an infection that eats away the inside lining of the heart usually around the valves. It is very aggressive and difficult to treat because the bacteria sits in a protective sack.

Dane had also suffered some brain damage from the infection flying off his heart and embedding in his brain but at this stage he was too ill to do any CT scans to see how bad. They were able to test his brain waves so we knew that he was still in there with us.

The most horrible thing we were told was that they had never heard of another baby being born with what Dane had or have it in such an advanced stage ( infecting both sides of the heart) and that if a baby or and child got this infection it had a very high mortality rate. We would be lucky if Dane survived the next hours let alone the next couple of days.