Widowed dad's sweet remainder ‘PAIGE IS SO LIKE HER MUM'

Now with Kat’s name on his daughter’s birth certifi cate, the father-daughter team can get on making memories

- Fleur Guthrie

Even though they’ve never met, gorgeous two-year-old Paige Harris can pick out her mother Katherine (Kat) in any photo.

“Mummy, Mummy!” chirps the excited toddler, pointing to pictures of Kat around their Te Kauwhata home.

All Kat wanted in life was to be a mum, says her widowed husband Kyle.

After suffering with the genetic disorder cystic fibrosis (CF) and then a double lung transplant in 2012, the young vet nurse had resigned herself to thinking that having children wouldn’t be part of their future.

“She would come back from friends’ baby showers crying,” Kyle recalls. “It was awful. She was happy for her friends and wanted to be part of their celebration, but the aftermath was horrible seeing her so upset. Medical advice was that it wasn’t safe for Kat to carry a baby because of the anti-rejection transplant drugs she was taking.

“Surrogacy was the only option for us to realise her dream. So we decided we would investigate and put a call out on Facebook to see if anyone we knew would do it.”

Friends Renee and Josh Johnson – who had finished their own family – offered to carry a baby for the couple, and through in-vitro fertilisation Renee became pregnant in the first round of IVF.

But in one of life’s cruel twists, weeks later Kat developed a “funny cough”. Investigations revealed her body had randomly begun rejecting her donated lungs and proved serious enough for her to be put back on the transplant list.