When Edaline was born at 27 weeks, she weighed only 900 grams.
She is our fourth child and the second one to be born premature. My second child, Eric, was also born early.
The doctors at the Singapore General Hospital kept her in the intensive care unit for one-and-a-half months before she was allowed to come home.
During that time and in the first two weeks after she came home, she seemed fine.
After that, she kept turning blue, especially during feeding time. She turned blue as many as three times a day.
Her father and I brought her back to the hospital but neither her doctor nor the specialist from the Ear, Nose and Throat Department could tell what was wrong. They concluded that her nose and nostrils were too small.
I would often need to clear Edaline's airway at home using a small hand pump. Sometimes, I had to administer CPR (cardio-pulmonary resuscitation).
I learnt the procedure after Eric was born. The doctor said I could not take him home unless I knew CPR.
Edaline was about three months old when she collapsed. I remember the date clearly - Feb 17 last year.
Her father sped us to the National University Hospital (NUH), the nearest hospital to us.
While I was giving her CPR in the car, I spotted a traffic cop on the side of the road issuing a ticket to another driver.
I shouted to him, asking him to clear the way for us as it was a matter of my baby's life or death. He dropped everything to ride ahead of us and that saved her life.
It was after a battery of tests that the doctors realised what was wrong - her trachea had collapsed, leaving the airway the size of a pinhole. To help her breathe, they performed a tracheotomy, cutting a hole in the windpipe into which a breathing tube could be inserted.
It was really trying when Edaline had the tube inserted. We were worried that her sister Emily, who had just turned three, would try to put bits of paper or beads into it.
You can imagine the trouble we would have had then!
My two sons Aaron and Eric helped keep an eagle eye over their sisters.
Because the tube was a foreign object, her throat got phlegmy and we had to constantly clear her airway and the tube. Even a simple cold became complicated.
Edaline also suffered from gastric reflux, which is when the stomach's acidic contents flow backwards into the oesophagus, the tube that connects the mouth to the stomach. This is a problem with most premature babies. It caused her a lot of tummy problems.
In August last year, she had a bout of diarrhoea which somehow caused her trachea to close up again. This time she was warded for four months.
Dr Lynne Lim, a consultant with the ENT Department at NUH, told us that she would need reconstructive surgery.
But at 12 months she weighed only 5kg, which made surgery risky. It was only after she finally put on 2kg that her windpipe could be rebuilt.
She was then 16 months old.
Dr Lim used two of Edaline's ribs to reconstruct her trachea. It seemed complicated but I am glad they did it to improve the quality of her life.
My daughter is a fighter and she knows what she wants. Even a tube in her throat didn't stop her doing what other babies her age do.
When the tube was finally taken out of her windpipe at the end of July, the first words she uttered were not da-da or ma-ma.
They were mum-mum (baby speak for food), which Emily had taught her.
