03 September 2023 , 19:47
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For one boy, starting school tomorrow will be an extra special milestone.
Four-year-old Ethan Eaves had a heart transplant during lockdown after spending most of his young life hooked up to a mechanical heart machine. He was diagnosed with an enlarged heart at eight months old. Mum Roselelia said: “It’s a line we never thought we’d be saying without Ethan’s donor – ‘Ethan starts school!’
“We all just can’t believe it that this poor baby who was confined to a bed, unable to run around or reach any milestones like other children, now has the chance to start school.” Now the family, from Luton, Beds, are looking forward to a bright future after little Ethan has come on leaps and bounds.
He was admitted to hospital at five months and stayed there until he came home in the summer of 2020 at 18 months, following his lifesaving transplant. He had been hooked up to a machine outside his body called a Berlin Heart. Roselelia, 38, said: “When we first sat him down in the living room on a changing mat, he leaned over and touched the carpet.
Ethan walking to school with mum and dad (Philip Coburn /Daily Mirror)“He pulled all these funny faces and tried to lay on it. It was only then we realised Ethan had never felt carpet before – the floors in hospitals are hard and cold. This was a whole new sensation for him. My baby boy at 18 months was experiencing everything new like he should have done all the months before.”
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Now Ethan is excited to be starting school like his older sisters Maia, 15, and Alanah, 10. Roselelia continued: “Ethan is delayed by a year so although he is four, mentally he is three. He has really started to talk now, which has helped so much. A lot of his frustrations and anger before was because he could not tell us what he wanted. However, he has come through stronger than ever.
“Ethan has grown into this crazy, funny, cheeky and stroppy at times, happy little man.” Engineer dad Richard, 40, suffers from the genetic condition right ventricular cardiomyopathy and received a heart in 2019, two months before his son was born. Transplants like Ethan’s are now more likely after the Mirror fought to change the law to one of presumed consent.
Roselelia, who works for a property firm, added: “I think of the donors every day, from the minute I wake up and see my husband’s face to Ethan running into our room. I am so thankful for another day with my boys. Our family is living proof of what organ donation can do.”
Confirm your organ donation decision on the NHS Organ Donor Register and visit www.organdonation.nhs.uk