Helping Samuel Thrive

Medical Support for Samuel Lobban

My name is Kimberley Douglas. I am organising a new Go Fund Me for Samuel and would love to give you an update on behalf of his parents Cameron and Emily.

Samuel is now three years old and has continued to surprise everyone with his progress and development. He has developed such a cheeky, happy character and personality; laughing and responding to his family, learning to eat solids, loves eating pancakes, sitting up assisted and his favourite thing is supported standing. Samuel loves it when his dad sings, he laughs and tries to join in. He especially loves bath time. His new trick in the bath is using his right arm to splash.

For those that don’t know Samuel’s journey and start in life, here is a brief summary.

On the 9th of February, 2020, Samuel Leo Lobban was born. It was a long and painful labour that resulted in Samuel’s heart rate dipping multiple times below the safe level. This eventually led to an emergency C-section. Samuel was born pale and starved of oxygen. It required 45 minutes of resuscitation in theatre to stabilise his heart and lungs until they could confirm whether he was alive or not. Samuel was then transferred to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) and required significant life-support, including around 20 different medications, to ensure his heart and lungs kept working and to keep seizures under control. Cameron and Emily were told Samuel had suffered from severe lack of oxygen to his brain, and were told he would never breathe, suck, swallow or chew on his own. This meant he would need feeding tubes the rest of his life and be incredibly disabled if he survived. Cameron and Emily were encouraged to look into palliative care but chose not to.

Samuel is a fighter, within 3 weeks, he had come off life support and the respirator, reduced his medications to two, and had begun to feed through a nasal-gastro tube. The family were able to take Samuel home after 4 weeks. After five months of persevering, Emily taught Samuel how to suck and swallow and he drank his milk by bottle, started eating food at 4 months and each day Emily teaches him how to chew, how to swallow, and how to use his hands to put food in his mouth.

Samuel has continuously challenged his support workers with achieving the impossible and with the support of a very large team he is hitting milestones that originally his parents were told would never happen.

Samuel continues a very rigorous Physio, Speech and Occupational Therapy regime, Hydrotherapy, Nutritional Therapy, Core support Therapy, Conductive Education Therapy and Cranial-sacral Therapy. Samuel’s mother Emily is his primary carer and dedicates her life to caring for him daily. It is exhausting both emotionally and physically.

In recent months Samuel has developed some new health challenges; seizures which are becoming more frequent, occurring multiple times in one day with severity and duration, sometimes up to 5 minutes. They are very distressing to experience and witness. These seizures have required a new level of medical, neurological care and intervention, an increase of medication bringing additional expensive medication.

Every cent that was raised for Samuel initially has been used for his care over many multi-disciplinary areas but we want to see Samuel flourish and be completely well and need to pursue extra financial support for medication support over and above his general medical care for the next 18 months.

Together with your help, I am hoping that we can raise some funds to relieve Cameron and Emily of some financial strain of his medical and health protocol. This will allow the family to concentrate on caring for him while focusing on his recovery and healing. With Cameron and Emily's permission we are raising funds to fully support Samuel’s health and medical program for the next 18 months.

Cameron and Emily are incredibly thankful for the support of so many, that continue to believe in them and know that with that support Samuel will continue to grow and develop to his full potential.