A couple are trying to raise £100K to care for two of their triplets who will be unable to go to school with their sister due to serious illness.
Four-year-old girls Lola, Daisy and Amber have been inseparable since birth but face being parted at primary as two of them are battling a rare illness.
Daisy and Amber became very ill when mum Lucy Collins, 33, was 17-weeks pregnant with them.
They were diagnosed with twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome, a rare condition where they shared a placenta with one baby acting as a donor and the other as a recipient.
Their illness means their kidneys are failing and there isn’t a cure to repair them.
Lucy and husband Jan, 38, have now started a fund-raising campaign so they can have treatment at home and lead a normal life.
Jan, a hydraulic engineer, said: “This illness is extremely dangerous and more often than not fatal.
“It causes one baby to shrink and the other to become oversized. Both Daisy and Amber were really really poorly.
“It was never going to be an option for us to allow one to die. There was no way in the world we could choose to do that, we just had to think ‘what will be will be’.
“Instead we tried laser ablation surgery which cauterised the blood vessels joining the babies together.
“The surgery was very effective, the doctors saved the girls’ lives. All we wanted was to hear three heartbeats.”
When Daisy was two she diagnosed with nephrotic syndrome, which meant the filters in her kidneys were leaking protein.
It causes the immune system to attack the kidneys. A little while later Amber was diagnosed with the same condition.
The condition means the two need round-the-clock care.
But the nearest unit and specialist hospital is over two hours away from their home in High Bickington, Devon.
Jan and Lucy, who also have two sons – baby Hadley and three-year-old Kenneth – need a whopping £97,500 to pay for an extension to their house so they can have space for the treatment machines and to store all of the medical equipment and accessories needed for dialysis.
They have raised around £2500 through crowdfunding so far.
Jan said: “No one expects their children to get ill, especially not two of them at the same time.
“I have worked all my life and Lucy worked up until the girls were ill. We have never asked anyone for anything and we have looked into other options but there is no other option.
“We know it was our decision to have a big family and we haven’t got a lot of room but that’s what bunk beds are for.
“But you cannot have kids on dialysis in bunk beds.
“We want our girls to stay together and have as normal a life as possible and to be able to learn and go to school together, which this home dialysis unit would enable.
“Our other children’s lives have been turned upside down as well. We’re doing what we can to keep our family together.
“This will mean I can keep my job, which is so important. It’s never going to be a normal life but we can try to keep it as normal for them as possible.
“Nothing is going to cure the girls but it might buy us a bit of time.”
