Reporter: Allison Langdon
Producers: Stephen Taylor, Julia Timms
Who could forget that smile? Or the amazing tale of bravery that went with it?
Alisa Camplin stole our hearts when she won gold at the 2002 Winter Olympics.
Only later did we discover that she did it with two fractured ankles.
But Alisa knows that broken bones are nothing.
In March, her son Finnan was born with congenital heart disease.
His fight to beat his illness was as inspiring and heroic as any of his mother's achievements.
This week, Allison Langdon brings us the inside story.
Story contacts:
Alisa Camplin and Oliver Warner's charity Finnan's Gift can be visited at www.finnansgift.com.au
Alisa Camplin spoke in detail about her loss with Woman's Day magazine, explaining, "my coping mechanism was quite clinical, I needed to understand exactly what was going to happen."
You can read more about Alisa Camplin's story in this Monday's edition of Woman's Day.
To see a PDF of Monday's Woman's Day click here.
Full transcript:
ALLISON LANGDON: It’s only been two months since Alisa Camplin and her husband Oliver Warner said goodbye to their 10-day-old son, Finnan. As anyone can imagine, these are raw and painful times. The couple’s emotional grief is overwhelming. It was never meant to be like this.
ALISA: You kind of get led into the world of parenthood and then 10 days later your baby’s gone and you’re pushed out and the door’s shut and you’re not a parent anymore. It’s like, am I a mum still?
ALLISON LANGDON: This is the Alisa Camplin Australia is used to. Our original Winter Olympics’ golden-girl, soaring high. First there were the medals then a blissfully happy wedding. Having a baby was supposed to complete the fairy-tale.
ALISA: Finnan was the first baby that we tried to have together and we were lucky because we conceived pretty much straight away. We thought at, from our first scan that we were having a little girl but as it turned out at our 20 week scan we found out it was a little boy, which was pretty exciting for us.
ALLISON LANGDON: Alisa’s pregnancy couldn’t have been better, until at 32 weeks everything changed - Another scan revealed multiple and major problems with Finnan’s heart. What did the doctors tell you?
ALISA: So Finnan was diagnosed with congenital heart disease and it’s amazing how quickly your perspective on things change you know. As a parent going into my 34th week, I was worrying whether I’d be able to breastfeed and if things would work out you know, you’re about counting 10 fingers and 10 toes. Well, you don’t expect anything worse you know.
OLIVER: I think it was the combination of all the issues that made Finnan’s case very much a sort of 1 in 10 million sort of scenario.
ALLISON LANGDON: Every elite athlete knows long odds are there to be overcome, so Alisa prepared for Finnan’s birth with the determination of the Olympian she is. She and Oliver learnt as much as they could about heart disease in babies and they gathered the best team of doctors and nurses they could find.
ALISA: I truly believed everything was going to work out OK.
ALLISON LANGDON: You thought he was going to survive?
ALISA: Oh yeah, I did. You know I was talking to my baby like all mothers do, but you know it was like I look forward to meeting you, but you’re gonna have a bit of a battle ahead when you come out.
ALLISON LANGDON: Finnan Maximus Camplin Warner was born at the Melbourne Women’s Hospital on the 10th of March. But he was so sick, Alisa had no chance to hold him. In fact, she barely got a look at her son, before he was raced 300 metres down the road to the Royal Children’s Hospital.
ALLISON LANGDON: So this is the contraption that they transported him…
OLIVER: Yeah, so I guess most kids talk about their first set of wheels, the first car. Finnan’s first set of wheels was a pretty impressive crib.
ALLISON LANGDON: Finnan was born six weeks premature, but weighed a pretty good 2.84kg.Within a few hours, he was on the operating table having open heart surgery. At first, things looked good.
OLIVER: We came out of that and we were like “oh, this is fantastic news”. I was emailing my family in England and it was all really, really good and then literally about an hour later you just notice that something’s sort of not right and his heart arrested and I was then sort of getting emails back from London saying “it’s great he’s pulled through”. So we go taught a lesson I guess at the very beginning there you’ve got to take the highs and the lows and just kind of smooth it.
DE CHEUNG: These are pictures of Finnan’s heart before the operation so when he was a couple of hours old and first came to us in the intensive care unit.
ALLISON LANGDON: Associate Professor Michael Cheung was Finnan’s cardiologist. He says while there were lots of problems with Finnan’s heart, the main one was his aortic valve.
DR CHEUNG: The complicating thing was not only the valve, it was the leaky valve, plus his prematurity. He was born a little bit early so that then makes the management more difficult.
ALISA: This is the room that Finnan was in. That was his little bed, and all these nurses are looking after other kids now, but they were all our nurses too.
ALLISON LANGDON: They all remember him?
ALISA: Yeah they become like family.
ALLISON LANGDON: The ICU at the Royal Children’s Hospital is a strangely comforting place both calm and chaotic. It’s where Alisa finally got to touch Finnan for the first time, two days after he was born.
ALISA: To feel how soft his skin was and how warm he felt, and it was the first chance I got to look at his face and you know, I was saying to him, “all you need to do is take in a deep breath, baboom, baboom, baboom, strong heartbeat”, and I kept saying it over again just reinforcing the little things he had to do, so it wasn’t all too big and scary for him.
OLIVER: So the next photo is one of Finnan in his little crib and I guess you get a sense of all the cables and wires that are supporting him.
ALLISON LANGDON: Look at them all attached. Nearly all of Alisa and Ollie’s photos of their precious boy show him hooked up to machines.
ALISA: I get sad though because no little baby deserves to be like that.
ALLISON LANGDON: But what a lot of people don’t know is there are many families in Australia with similar albums.
DR CHEUNG: In the general population about 1 in 100 children are born with congenital heart disease.
ALLISON LANGDON: When you say 1 in 100 kids, to me that’s an astonishing figure.
DR CHEUNG: It’s a huge number, it is an enormous number. People don’t think children have heart problems, it’s a condition of adulthood, it’s a condition of um, people who’ve done it to themselves, smoking, poor habits you know diet, exercise, but these aren’t conditions that are related to lifestyle, the children are born with it already.
ALLISON LANGDON: This is a close-up look at young life - the beating heart of a toddler. It’s beautiful, but it’s also broken and today, in a four-hour operation, it’s being fixed. So the outcome is pretty good?
SURGEON: Well, the heart recovers very well and very nicely.
ALLISON LANGDON: It’s complicated, but not rare, and here at the Royal Children’s Hospital they do 1,000 heart surgeries every year. 3-year-old Hamish Willis owes his life to the doctors. He has one of the most serious forms of congenital heart disease, and has had six open heart operations.
EDDY: He’s full of beans. He’s 100% go from daylight to dusk, isn’t he?
JODIE: Yeah, absolutely. He’s got a very vibrant personality.
ALLISON LANGDON: Mum, Jodie, found out there was something seriously wrong with Hamish’s heart at her 20 week scan. Back then, she and husband Eddie faced some terrible decisions.
EDDY: They told us at that point that we had a choice of either going full term and losing him at birth or terminating straight away.
ALLISON LANGDON: Do you ever question the decision you made to have him?
EDDY: No.
JODIE: Never, definitely not.
ALLISON LANGDON: The doctors haven’t been able to figure out why some baby’s hearts don’t develop properly - genetics or just bad luck – but they are making progress and that’s good news for Hamish. If he’d been born a decade ago, it’s doubtful he’d have made it to see the pandas today. But all those operations to re-plumb his heart have meant that – fingers crossed – things are now looking up. What’s his prognosis?
DR CHEUNG: I’m very hopeful for Hamish. I ah, I think he’s got a fairly good out look over these next 20, 30 years.
ALLISON LANGDON: Little Hamish Willis is a fighter and so was Finnan Camplin-Warner, but ultimately, the medical complications he faced were too much for his tiny body.
ALISA: You know the doctors came to us on day eight and said that there’s looking like there’s battles that Finnan can’t win anymore, and there’s nothing more that can really be done, and he can’t, he can’t win anymore because his whole system needs to work and just things got too hard.
ALLISON LANGDON: You knew you were going to lose him?
ALISA: Yeah.
OLIVER: They moved Finnan to a private room and um, we basically in effect had a night as a family. So we were able to sleep in the same double bed as Finnan, hold him and stroke him, be with him. So it was a very special time.
ALISA: And his heart was slowing down but then he would open his eyes and just stare at me. So beautiful and ah, I get a little panicked because sometimes I think he was looking at me going “Mummy, I don’t want to go.” And I don’t know if I have enough good memories of touching him, and I can’t smell him anymore and I can’t feel him. But I was just trying to make him feel not panicked, that he could rest now and it was OK, that being brave wasn’t fighting, that being brave was letting go. I feel like I did the right thing as a parent.
ALLISON LANGDON: You had to let him know that he’d done enough?
ALISA: Yeah. He did all he could?
OLIVER: I think we’d spent nine days saying don’t quit, keep going, little baby steps, keep fighting and Alisa really wanted just to reassure him that it was time, being strong, not quitting was actually letting go.
ALLISON LANGDON: Do you ever think why us?
OLIVER: I think it’s only natural you think that. I don’t, we don’t dwell on it though. I don’t …
ALISA: There’s no answers to that question.
OLIVER: It doesn’t achieve anything to spend your energy and time dwelling on it.
ALLISON LANGDON: It’s a mark of this couple that despite their grief, their memories of the Royal Children’s Hospital are good ones. And now Alisa and Oliver are even trying to help the hospital help other sick babies with heart disease. So can this mean the difference between picking up a tiny heart defect and not?
DR CHEUNG: It can.
ALLISON LANGDON: The aim is to raise money to buy another one of these much-needed but expensive echo machines.
ALISA: But the equipment and the research is what’s going to get us to the next era so that less children die of congenital heart disease.
ALLISON LANGDON: So this is necessary?
ALISA: Oh, yeah.
ALLISON LANGDON: Alisa and Oliver hope they might be parents again one day, but in the meantime they’re determined to make everyone more aware about congenital heart disease in babies. It’s their gift to their son Finnan.
ALISA: And we want Finnan’s 10 days on earth to stand for something.
OLIVER: To really count for something.
ALISA: To really count. It counts to us, but we don’t want the world to forget him, and he wouldn’t want other little babies to go through what he went through. And so now we want to, we want to raise money and buy some equipment to help, so other little babies can survive and enjoy a really good life because Finnan deserved that, and every baby deserves that.
