May 2015 Featured Child: Sheng

The month of May brings sunshine and warmth here in Beijing and to reflect that, this month’s featured child, adorable Sheng, is full of joy and brightness.

Sheng came to us in April 2014 as a one month old baby. Her orphanage contacted us as she was having a lot of medical issues and the doctors were not quite sure what was wrong with her. We were not sure of this little one’s sex and suspected adrenal hyperplasia. Due to her condition, our medical team decided to bring her to Beijing and admit her into the hospital to get checked out by specialists to find out more.

The doctors diagnosed her with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, commonly referred to as CAH. The medications used to treat CAH are steroids and they affect the immune system. Because of this, babies with CAH are quite immunocompromised and need to be watched very carefully for any signs of illness.   At this point, since we knew what her condition was, we figured she was ready to come back to the baby home and start her recovery.

Unfortunately, she soon got pneumonia and had to be readmitted into ICU for more than a week. After treatment, once she was no longer in critical condition, she returned back to the baby home. But again, for just a short stay. She had to go back to the hospital as her condition got worse again. These first few months were very tense as there were a lot of unknowns and visits to the hospital for this little one. But she flourished through all of this!

Since then, she has been stable and growing ever since!  Just like any other child, she started to crawl and become bigger and healthy!

She is such a happy girl, always smiling and bringing joy to everyone around her!

In March,  she celebrated her one year old birthday with a birthday cake!

As a 14 month baby now, she enjoys walking and exploring all things around her. These days, she also loves to sing and do hand motions to songs like  ‘Wheels on the bus’!

She is soon going to transfer into our group home project. Due to the extra checkups that she needs on a regular basis for her CAH condition, we felt that she would be a good fit for our long term group home project.