After a harrowing first two years of life and three major operations, she is now going to be fine.
Born with pulmonary atresia with multiple Mapcas, a rare congenital defect of the heart, her life hung in balance.
Doctors in her native Ho Chi Minh City could not help her.
The New Paper reported yesterday that a woman, expecting a baby with the same condition, was told to abort the baby. But the young parents refused to do so.
And baby Tran's story may provide more hope.
Her desperate parents asked around and found out that there was a surgeon in Singapore who might be able to help.
Baby Tran and her mother flew here in October 2006 to consult with Dr Sriram Shankar, senior consultant cardiothoracic and vascular surgeon at National Heart Centre, KK Women's and Children's Hospital and Gleneagles Medical Centre.
Dr Sriram has operated on about 20 Vietnamese children in the last two years for various heart conditions.
Among these, four suffer the same condition as Tran. Tran is the only one to have completed all three stages of the operation.
Dr Sriram has seen 12 Singaporean children with the same condition since 1998.
Some of them cannot be operated on, and three or four are undergoing the various stages of the operation. One has completed all three stages of the operation and, like Tran, is doing well.
Ms Nguyen Ngoc Bich, Tran's mother, said: "He examined her and said he could help her, he could do the operations."
She flew back to Ho Chi Minh City with her daughter and hope in her heart, and waited for the first stage of a three-stage operation to set Tran's heart right.
When her baby daughter was born, Ms Nguyen, 35, a pianist, was overjoyed.
It was the little girl she had always wanted.
Her other child is a boy, now aged 5.
But things went wrong quickly. When Tran was 2 months old, she caught an infection. Ms Nguyen could see that her child was not just ordinarily sick.
She said: "She had great difficulty breathing and she was turning very blue. From the start, I had already thought she wasn't as pink as she should be."
MISSING ARTERY
Tran's pulmonary artery (which sends blood to the lungs to be oxygenated) was essentially missing.
Instead, some vessels (known as Mapcas) arise from various levels of the aorta (the main blood vessel supplying oxygenated blood to the body) and supply the lungs.
Dr Cindy Hia, consultant pediatric cardiologist at University Children's Medical Institute in the National University Hospital, said: "For such conditions, the mixing of the oxygenated and de-oxygenated blood occurs through a large hole in the heart and this 'mixed' blood is supplied to the rest of the body via the aorta, which is the only outlet in this situation."
Hence, in this condition, the patient will appear blue.
Unlike in Singapore, where such conditions can be detected even before the baby is born, Ms Nguyen had no idea until Tran caught an infection at two months of age.
"I wasn't going to let her die just like that. Dr Sriram gave us hope and we decided we would fight for her life," Ms Nguyen said.
It has been a long and arduous fight.
They returned to Singapore in January 2007 for the first of Tran's operations when she was 6 months old. The operation went well. But she fell ill twice after she returned to Ho Chi Minh City and had to be hospitalised for about two months.
Ms Nguyen, whose husband works in the IT industry in Ho Chi Minh City, said: "When she falls sick or catches an infection, it's very hard for her to recover on her own."
In August 2007, they returned to Singapore for the second stage of the operation.
The operation went well, but after they returned to Ho Chi Minh City, Tran fell sick repeatedly. "She had lung infections, throat infections," Ms Nguyen said, "so she was in and out of the hospital for almost a year."
Despite all the challenges and hardship, Tran persevered and managed to make it back to Singapore about three months ago to prepare for the third stage of the operation.
Those three months before the operation were very eventful as Tran developed a fever, which took a long time to resolve, and also diabetes.
But she finally had her operation done on 13 Jul. Dr Sriram said: "This is one of the joys of doing this work. She's going to make a complete recovery."
An overjoyed Ms Nguyen said: "Now she's fine. All her problems are resolved. She's much pinker, her skin looks more normal."
Their friends and relatives have chipped in to help with the hefty cost of all the operations, which have come up to more than $100,000 despite Dr Sriram waiving his fees.
Ms Nguyen said: "We have had so much help even from Singaporeans. One Singaporean donated $10,000 to help Tran."
Carrying the 2-year-old Tran, who had been watching the interview process with interest, she added: "I can tell she is improving and developing much faster than before. My hopes have come true."
She flies home with Tran tomorrow.
This article was first published in The New Paper on August 1, 2008.
