202 DAYS IN HOSPITAL

Little Rikus Schutte spent the early months of his life in an intensive care ward. Now he's home his parents are delighting in his mischievous behaviour

- ROSS MICHAELS

HE'S a real little daredevil, hoisting himself up on the coffee table, climbing all over his mom, stealing his brother's toy soldiers and putting them in his mouth the terrible twos have arrived early in this household.

Parents often want to pull their hair out during this whirlwind toddler phase but Anerike and Marinus Schutte of Pretoria East love every chaotic second.

Seventeen-month-old Rikus' antics are a marvel to them - proof that the son they feared they might lose is growing and developing and doing normal little kid stuff.

When your child spent a total of 202 days in hospital in his first year of life, you learn to be grateful for every moment, Anerike says. "Looking at him now you'd never say he was so sick."

But Rikus was at death's door. He stopped breathing for the first time on brother Evan's third birthday in March last year when he was just one month old.

His parents rushed through every red traffic light to get him to Life Wilgers Hospital in Pretoria and by the time they got there Rikus was turning blue.

"It felt like he was dead," Anerike (34) recalls. "He was absolutely limp in my arms and totally unresponsive."

The baby was revived by doctors but it was just the beginning of the long nightmare.

A day later Rikus was transferred to the intensive care unit of Mediclinic Kloof Hospital and hooked up to tubes and machines as doctors tried to get to the bottom of what was wrong.

It was a heartbreaking sight, Anerike says. "He was on all these monitors in this small steel bed where they shone a warm light on him but he had no clothes on, just stickers and wires all over him." Day after day, night after night, their son lay in the cot, hooked up to machines that beeped and hissed. Tests were done for digestive problems, reflux, rare genetic disorders and even Down syndrome but everything came back negative.