Carla’s Recovery Fund

Hi my name is Anne and I am fundraising to help with our beautiful daughter Carla’s recovery from an injury to her spinal cord during complicated spinal surgery in Great Ormond Street Hospital in London.

Carla is 14 and had her surgery on 30th April. After 8 hours in surgery she couldn’t feel her legs. After scans and further surgery it was discovered some of the metal work damaged her spinal cord and she was paralysed from her stomach down to her feet.

Her consultant is hopeful her spinal cord will recover in time with specialist rehabilitation. She is showing some small improvements but it is very slow.

Carla is waiting to be moved from Great Ormond Street to a special unit in Stanmore hospital here in London to start her rehabilitation. Unfortunately we can’t go home to NI for this as there are no suitable rehabilitation units for spinal cord injuries in children. This may take weeks or months and everything is very uncertain. We are trying our best to keep Carla’s spirits up while battling our own fears and worries.

We are setting up this fundraiser to help with ongoing costs facing us as a family. Dessie and I are here alone and feeling very isolated. We have two sons at home and would love to be able to fly them over every so often to spend time with their little sister. We would also like to take short trips home occasionally to spend time with our boys and enjoy some family time.

We have promised Carla we will book a shopping trip to New York when she recovers. We hope this will help motivate her to work hard with her rehabilitation and any funds raised will also go towards the cost of the trip.

We both have jobs and, although they are supporting us, we know this can’t happen indefinitely, we will need to take unpaid leave at some stage.

It is such an uncertain and worrying time for us all but we are determined to do whatever we can to get Carla well again and get her home to her family and friends.

Thank you all so much in advance.

The Hughes Family