Mum moves 60km to ease sick daughter’s hospital trip

A mother whose daughter has a serious heart condition was so worried that an ambulance would not get her to Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital, Crumlin, on time that she moved 60km.

Leonna Smith, 26, says that if she had called an ambulance from her former home, in Navan, Co Meath, it would not have been allowed to bring her five-month-old daughter, Megan, directly to Crumlin and her doctors.

Leonna says the ambulance crew would have had to bring Megan to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, in Drogheda, from where she would be transferred to Dublin.

She feared her daughter’s life could have been in jeopardy if that had happened.

“Megan has hypo-plastic left-heart syndrome,” said Leonna. “The left side of her heart stopped developing when I was five weeks pregnant, so she only has half of a heart.

“She had her first open heart surgery when she was three days old and she is scheduled to have another one in the next two weeks.”

All of her daughter’s medical care is provided by a specialist cardiology team for children, at Our Lady’s Hospital, in Crumlin.

“The protocol is that she must be brought to Drogheda,” said Leonna. “She would be properly stabilised there and then brought to Dublin, but I don’t think the journey from Navan to Drogheda would do her any good and, to be honest, I don’t think she would last the journey.”

Such was Leonna’s fear for Megan’s health that she relocated from Navan to Dublin.

I ended up going homeless with the council and we were in hotels and B&Bs and this is a temporary apartment,” she said.

She is living in Tallaght, with her son, Michael, 2, who has asthma, while her elder son, David, 10, lives in Navan with his father. She is only 15 minutes by bus from Crumlin Hospital.

Leonna said that, in the five months since her birth, Megan “has been home for seven weeks”.

“She has had one open heart surgery, two closed heart surgeries, and she had a bug,” said Leonna.

If she was confident that an ambulance would be allowed to bring her daughter straight from Navan to Our Lady’s Hospital, “I’d probably still be in Navan, to be honest. If there were proper facilities where she could get the proper care she needs, I would have stayed in Navan,” said Leonna

The HSE in the north-east said an ambulance would take a child with a known cardiac condition “to the nearest appropriate emergency department”.