Watching helplessly as her newborn daughter gasped for breath in the hospital incubator, her tiny chest rising and falling in frantic bursts, Julie Neville raised her eyes to the ceiling and prayed.
Little Isabella had been born ten weeks prematurely after suffering a stroke in the womb and was on 95 per cent life support to help her breathe and pump blood to her fragile heart and lungs. Five per cent more and she would have been legally pronounced dead.
Tubes criss-crossed her stomach, carrying life-saving medicine to her organs and limbs. Her tiny eyes were squeezed shut, her fists — no bigger than a fingernail — clenched in pain.
As a neonatal nurse searched for a patch of skin to put yet another line into her daughter’s frail body, Julie turned to her and asked: ‘How on earth do you do this job?’
‘Her reply has stuck with me ever since,’ says Julie. ‘She told me: “I used to work in an adult intensive care ward before I came here. If these babies were adults, they would have given up by now. But babies keep fighting. They never give up.” ’
Thirteen years later, Julie’s baby has proved that nurse right — time and time again.
From those dark early days when they feared the worst and a diagnosis of cerebral palsy when Isabella was 18 months old, she has grown into a happy, confident teenager — an inspiring feat, especially as Julie and her husband Phil, the former Manchester United and England footballer, were told their daughter would never walk, talk or lead a normal life.
Not only can Isabella walk, run, dance and play sports, she has just achieved another dream: to be signed by a top modelling agency.
