Why my little heart? I wanted to write you my full of life and interesting story with my tiny heart. In my story, my dear father will be writing my emotions, feelings and experiences from his own pen.

My name is Tuana, before my dear mother got pregnant with me, she said that if I have a daughter, I will name her Tuana and she did as she said. When my dear mother got pregnant with me, she bought herself a diary, she wanted to write her pregnancy process every day and read it to me when I grew up. I would have loved you to know my mother, she used to choose her words carefully so as not to offend people and sometimes she preferred to remain silent, she didn’t have many expectations from this world, she always thought that I should have a warm home and that we should be able to fend for ourselves. A mother who worked for many years and not only stood on her own feet, but also provided financial support to her family and siblings. My parents were born in the same neighborhood and were the same age. They moved to another place when my dear father was still young. Although the environment in which my father and mother grew up was very different, it was immediately obvious from the outside that they loved each other very much. My father didn’t have to work like my mother and grew up comfortably. He and my mother have very different perspectives on life, but their love for each other is huge. They made a place for me in this big ball of love. My father was very happy when my mother told him she was pregnant, and my mother was surprised by my father’s reaction. Of course the excitement started, their happiness was visible in their eyes. During my mother’s pregnancy, my father did everything with love, whether it was massaging my mother’s feet or running to the soup kitchen. Now, of course, it was time for me to come into the world.

I was born tired and exhausted after a long and difficult birth process. My mother had to push so hard to give birth to me that she didn’t have the strength to push anymore. My dear mother had no experience. She was giving birth for the first time. The doctor was also trying to get me out as soon as possible. As a result of the doctor’s efforts, I came out of my mother’s belly, albeit with difficulty. I was happy with the way I was in my mother’s belly, I was making a good living on my own. My mother was having a hard time carrying me, but I didn’t want her to get pregnant. I was so tired that I couldn’t even suck my mother’s breast. They always woke me up and disturbed me when I was sleeping. I was supposed to be fed but I was very sleepy. Then an old man came and wanted to examine me, he was the pediatrician of the hospital. I had just come into the world and they wouldn’t leave me alone. He looked like an old and experienced doctor. He listened to my little heart and told my father that something might be wrong. My mom and dad couldn’t make sense of what the doctor said. My uncle, aunt, grandfather and grandmother all came. My mother and I stayed in the hospital for a night and rested well, then they took us home. My father took care of everything for us, I often woke my mother up, I was hungry, I was just a newborn and I was hungry. During the day my father was at work and my mother and I had a great time at home. My mother sang songs to me, talked to me and I talked back to her. I loved my mother very much and I felt her love very much. In the evening my father came home, he was so afraid of hurting me that he approached me very nervously. Occasionally my grandmother would come, she would help my mother, they would wash me and wash me clean. As the days went by like this, they took me to Adana to see a doctor to see if there was something wrong with my little heart. The doctor examined me, and while the doctor was talking to my parents, both of them had tears in their eyes and were crying their eyes out. Then they took me to another doctor to make sure.

In this second hospital they took me to, they hurt me a lot, they couldn’t find a vein in my arms, so they opened the vein in my head. I was in a lot of pain. My father was going crazy, arguing with a nurse. The orderly was warning my father to get out. My father didn’t want to go out, he didn’t want to leave my mother and me alone. Then they put me to sleep to do an angioplasty. When I woke up, I was exhausted from the anesthesia and my mother and father were very depressed and sad. Fortunately, our doctor visits stopped for a while. My mom and I continued to have a great time at home. I was responding better to my mom, I was almost four months old.

Unfortunately, it didn’t last long, we started visiting doctors again and went to Istanbul. We were staying with my father’s relatives in Istanbul. My dear father took my hospital papers and visited doctors and hospitals. There were only four doctors in Turkey who could treat me. None of the doctors he went to spoke positively to my father, even one of them did not even look at the documents and said that he could not do it. Finally, he met with Prof. Dr. Emin TİRELİ, a very valuable doctor at Çapa University Hospital. Mr. Emin told my father “This is a risky operation, if you share the risk, I will do this operation”. According to my doctor, he had to do this operation before he was six months old. There is a vessel called the pulmonary artery and this vessel has not developed in me. It was damaging my lungs because it was underdeveloped. My father and mother had to make a decision: either this operation would be done or I would live as long as I could. My parents chose to try while there was still a chance to try. In fact, there was no medical cure for my illness. After I was admitted to the hospital, preparations for the operation began, nurses were taking blood from me and doing the necessary tests. My dear mother was taking such good care of me that I was in a good mood. We were waiting for the day of the operation and one evening, although I was thirsty and hungry, my mother did not let me drink water and did not breastfeed me, and in the morning I was both hungry and very thirsty, and they started to undress me, I think this was the day of the operation. My father, my mother and I were walking through the corridors of the hospital together, we were always going down. You could see all the emotions on my father and mother’s face: anxiety, fear, sadness. As we continued to walk through the hospital corridors, we came to a place with big doors, they handed me over to the men, I was very scared and when I was separated from my mother I started crying, I couldn’t understand who these men were and why they handed me over. My mother and father, who didn’t know what to do when I cried, handed me over to these men who didn’t pay any attention to my crying. The men took me to a cold room and the men were as cold as the room. They immediately put me to sleep like when they do an angioplasty. My parents were waiting for me outside in tears. We were lost in the unknown of a medically incurable condition, an operation with an uncertain outcome. An operation that lasted six or seven hours. When I woke up, they had tied my hands and feet to the bed so that I wouldn’t damage the devices and cables they had connected me to, a lot of devices were attached to my body and when I woke up, I was put back to sleep. While I was sleeping, the smell of my mother came to my nose, which was what I needed the most at that moment. It turned out that my dear mother had come to see me and brought her milk to see me. The effects of the operation and the drugs were too heavy on my little body, I was not well, the only thing that was good for me was my mother’s smell and my mother’s milk. After a while I started to have difficulty breathing, they made a hole in my throat and I started to breathe through a tube they connected to this hole. Every day I was getting weaker and weaker and I didn’t even have enough strength to lift my arm and hold it in the air.

One of the intensive care nurses used to play the nodding game with me. When she came to me, Tuana would shake her head left and right, saying no, and I would do the same. She was smiling and made me laugh. Six months passed until the operation wounds closed and she was able to leave the intensive care unit. In the six months in intensive care, there were people who came and recovered, people who passed away, and all of these people were babies like me. My mother could only come to me twice a day. My dear mother was in and out of the hospital for months because of me. A difficult six-month intensive care period was over and they were going to take me to the ward to be with my mother. My dear mother was very worn out and tired. Thanks to my mother’s presence and the energy she gave me, I was going to leave the intensive care unit.

I came out of the intensive care unit, but unfortunately my leg muscles had weakened a lot during this time, I couldn’t stand on my own feet, but I wanted to be naughty. I wanted to be spoiled after six months of captivity. I had spent six months in intensive care with my hands and feet tied, I had to make up for it, I was exhausting my mother with the mischief I was doing. I spent my first birthday in the hospital, my mother and I celebrated my first birthday in the hospital, unfortunately my father could not attend. My dear mom was taking care of me while my dear dad was working. My mother had a very beautiful cake made, she served my cake to the hospital staff and other patients and relatives. It was very sad but fun that my dear mother was celebrating her first child’s first birthday in this way.

Two months later, I was finally going to be discharged. My dear mother never left me and never gave up hope. My mother stayed with me in the hospital for eight months and with the happiness of my discharge, we were on our way to go home again. Because I was breathing through a hole in my throat, the officials said I could not get on the plane, but my dear father took care of that too. I needed serious care like in the hospital. I had to get oxygen through an oxygen cylinder and ventolin through vapor. Because of the hole in my throat, I couldn’t make a sound, I couldn’t talk back to my mother as I used to do before. My dear mother was very good at taking care of me and I was up to mischief. I wanted to do everything I couldn’t do in the hospital, but my legs were very weak and I had only learned to crawl with great difficulty. When they took me out to the balcony, I would look at the people outside and get excited. One evening when I, my mother and father were sitting on the balcony, loud music was coming from somewhere nearby. I started to play by clapping my hands, my parents loved it, I was so active that I wanted to do everything I could think of. When I woke up in the morning, my father had gone to work, and in the evening I was impatiently waiting for his return. When I heard the sound of the door, I crawled towards the door with all my strength, waiting for my father to take me in his arms. When my father was at home, he played games with me, tying a string to my spider and pulling me up and down the hallway. I was having so much fun, and when my father stopped, I would raise hell.

As the days went by like this, our trips to the doctor started again, but these doctor visits were not like the previous ones, we had to get physical therapy for my legs. When I saw people in white coats, I didn’t want any of them to approach me because I remembered my hospital days. The physical therapist’s efforts were not enough to overcome my fear and they gave up. At home, my mother made me do the movements related to physical therapy herself.

The fact that I was trying to make a sound by pulling the tube attached to my throat left and right made my mother and father think that it might be time to remove this tube, at the same time my doctor Emin TİRELİ was going to check me. We were on our way to Istanbul again. I was very anxious to come to that hospital again. When we entered my doctor’s room, he wanted to listen to my heart and I started to cry, then the doctor said to my mother “well done, you took good care of the child”, but the attempt to remove the tube was not successful because when they tried to remove the tube, my breathing was not enough for me.

We went back home and the days went by with my mischief and one night my mother woke me up while I was sleeping and took me to my grandmother’s house and I didn’t see my father for a long time, it turned out that my mother and I had abandoned my father. One day my breathing was not enough for me, they took me to the hospital, then my father came, we stayed in the hospital for a while and then we went back to my grandmother’s house, but I was not well. I was just starting to stand up, but I was getting tired very quickly because my breathing was not enough for me. One day I couldn’t breathe again, but this time it was different from the others. They took me to the hospital where I was born and connected me to a machine in intensive care so that I could breathe. My dear father came and kissed my feet and sang to me while I was barely breathing with the machine. I looked at my father for a moment and wanted to react, but I was breathing very hard. My father went to Istanbul to take me to the hospital where I had surgery, I was having more and more difficulty every minute to breathe.

My dear mother was always by my side and I didn’t have the strength to endure anymore.

I took one last look at my mother’s face and after I raised my hand and touched her cheek, my little heart stopped.

My twenty-two-month life story that started with My Tiny Heart ended with the stopping of my tiny heart.