English wedding invite 'saves life' of Highland baby

Isabella Di Rollo fell ill with a serious heart problem when her parents Chris and Sarah had travelled from their Highland home to the wedding on the Isle of Wight.

As her condition began to worsen, specialists from a nearby hospital rushed to treat her.

But had she been at home, in Leckmelm, three miles north of Ullapool, she would have been more than 100 miles from specialist help and may not have survived.

Her father, Chris, 40, said: "Had it all happened where we live she may never have got the treatment she needed in time, because she would have had to go to Glasgow or Edinburgh, which are the only places that could have taken her.

"Aberdeen and Inverness just don't have that kind of paediatric intensive care unit or are able to do the surgery.

"You never know how things would have been if it had happened here, but if it had been in the same kind of timespan, it just wouldn't have worked. As it is, the specialists arrived with minutes to spare. It was literally that touch and go."

Chris, a mountain rescue medical technician, and Sarah, a GP, had travelled to the Isle of Wight for her best friend's wedding.

During the flight down, Isabella became a bit unwell and pale. But the next day, her condition started to deteriorate. "When we got to the wedding in the late afternoon she was looking very pale and almost blue around the lips," Di Rollo said. "We decided to leave the wedding and go to the A&E department at the hospital (on the Isle of Wight]. They weren't happy with what they were seeing and initially thought she might have a chest infection and was not getting enough oxygen. They tried various forms of oxygen therapy but she started to deteriorate quite rapidly."

The hospital then started liaising with the heart specialists at Southampton General Hospital, ten miles away across the Solent in Hampshire.

A scan had revealed an abnormality in Isabella's chest and it was decided she needed to be transferred to the mainland but as her condition was deteriorating further, a specialist retrieval team was sent by high-speed ferry to stabilise her condition.

Her father said: "When the specialists arrived they gave us that dreaded conversation, that you need to expect the worst because we are not sure we can turn this around. That was horrendous. But to their credit they got her on life support and turned it around."

When she was stable, Isabella was taken by ferry to the specialist cardiac unit at Southampton General Hospital in the early hours of the morning, where a scan revealed she had a condition known as coarctation of the aorta - a narrowing of the main artery from the heart.

She then had emergency surgery to repair the fault, effectively saving her life.