Brave Sophie Campbell is a picture of health – after surgeons took her skull apart and pieced it back together like a jigsaw.
The four-year-old was born with the rare condition craniosynostosis, which caused the bones in her skull to fuse too early. It left her with an abnormally shaped head and no room for her brain to grow.
Doctors warned her devastated mother, Fiona, that without a risky eight-hour operation, she would suffer permanent brain damage.
She also needed major surgery in January when a painful spinal condition almost left her paralysed.
The ordeal left Sophie so petrified of hospitals that she refuses to let anyone measure her feet for new shoes – for fear they are going to take blood. She now visits play therapists at Raigmore Hospital in Inverness to overcome the phobia.
But despite spending her life in and out of hospital, Sophie is a bright, active little girl.
“To see her now you would never know there was anything wrong,” said Mrs Campbell, 31, from Dingwall.
“She’s a totally different child. It’s only when you look at photos of her before that you notice the shape of her head is different.
“The doctors asked me if I was concerned by the shape of her head. But I was blind right up until her first operation. I just saw my beautiful baby and didn’t think there was anything wrong with her.
“But when I went in to see her after the operation I noticed straight away, there was a whole difference in her face. I thought, ‘oh, my God, she’s got eye brows’.”
The operation involved cutting her skull from ear to ear in a zigzag pattern.
Mrs Campbell said: “They had to pull down the front of her face, break the plates and take out her eyebrow bone, reshape it and put it back together. She had six nuts and bolts in her head, which dissolved, and 120 stitches.”
The operation took place at the Southern General Hospital, Glasgow, three days before Sophie’s first birthday.
Craniosynostosis can cause learning difficulties so Sophie’s condition is monitored regularly although she appears in perfect health.
But her nightmare did not end there. She constantly woke up screaming and it was only last year, when she could talk, that her mother discovered it was because her legs were sore.
Doctors were unable to find the cause, and even tested for leukaemia before discovering a tethered spinal cord. It stretched the nerves in her spine, causing weakness and severe pain in her legs. Sophie underwent a two-hour operation for this in January.
Mrs Campbell and her twin sisters, Jane and Helen York, now plan to jump 10,000ft out of a plane to raise money for the hospitals that cared for Sophie.
They have already collected more than £2,000 for Yorkhill Children’s Charity, Edinburgh Sick Kids Foundation and the Archie Foundation, which funds the play therapists.