‘Brave Bobby is the joy of our lives’

BABY Bobby Carroll is such a happy child these days that it is hard to imagine him as an infant with needles and drips coming out of him and screaming incessantly.

“He is a perfect baby — always smiling when he is out and about, so people look at him and wonder what is all the fuss about,” said his doting dad, Jimmy.

Bobby hit the headlines last year when after five days of waiting for a surgical bed for his son, his distraught father could take no more of his heartbreaking cries for help, disconnected drips from his arm and drove him to a specialist hospital in Dublin for emergency surgery.

Bobby, who has a rare congenital disorder, had cried for days at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda. The tiny tot needed emergency surgery to correct a narrowing of the opening between his stomach and intestines and had been vomiting and having convulsions.

A doctor at the A&E in Drogheda assessed the five-week-old child, who was urinating from his back passage, and admitted him as a patient, until he could be transferred to Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children in Dublin.

“He had tubes out of him, needles out of him and the screaming out of him was horrific,” said Mr Carroll when he recalled how be broke down in tears on RTÉ Radio when describing his son’s plight.

After five days, Mr Carroll and his partner, Jennifer Martin, from Ardee, Co Louth, decided they had enough and took matters into their own hands.

Mr Carroll ordered staff at Drogheda to disconnect his son from a drip and monitoring systems and took him by car to Crumlin.

Little Bobby, now just over a year old, was attended to within minutes of his arrival in Crumlin and operated on within hours.

When Bobby became ill a few weeks ago Mr Carroll did not think twice about taking him to Crumlin because he wanted to ensure he got the care and attention he needed immediately.

Bobby, who is still passing urine from his back passage, needs reconstruction surgery because he has no tube from his bladder to his penis.

Mr Carroll said the first of three surgical operations that Bobby needs was conducted in Crumlin last October and involved bringing a new tube from his bladder down through his back passage.

The next two operations that are required will bring the tube up through the child’s penis.

“I would have thought that the second operation would have been conducted by now but, again, we have to wait for a bed to become available,” said Mr Carroll.

“We were told that the three operations would be completed within a year but it might take longer — the first operation was put back by nearly two months because there was no bed available.”

Mr Carroll, a painter and decorator, said his partner had to give up work to care for Bobby because no childminder was able to attend to his needs.

And with the slump in construction, Mr Carroll has been out of work since Christmas.

“Things are bad at the moment but Bobby is the greatest joy of our lives. He is keeping us going,” he said.

Mr Carroll and his partner are hoping they will be entitled to receive a domiciliary care allowance, a monthly means-tested payment made to the carer of a child with a severe disability who lives at home.

“We are struggling at the moment,” he admitted. “But we are also a million times happier because we have Bobby.”