Inspirational tale of a mother's love conquering all

It begins in summertime with Nia (a journalist who's just quit her job) and Alex (a photographer on the same paper) hanging out in their flat in Cardiff, eagerly awaiting the birth of their first baby. He arrives -- blue eyed, black haired, pearl-skinned perfection -- to bliss all around.
 
Bliss flips over into terror within hours though, as baby Joe's skin colour changes, and he is rushed down to intensive care, frantic mum and dad rushing after, as if they'd had their "insides taken away".
 
Initial diagnosis is not serious. Nia has had (undiagnosed) diabetes; Joe's blood sugars have been "all over the place". Post "stabilisation", mum, dad and baby are sent home. Family and friends' joy is unbounded, but Nia is worried. Joe's cry has changed. She can't feed him. He arches back, flinging wide his arms.
 
She's told everything's fine, she's just an anxious first mum, she's got "baby blues". But, when Joe returns, barely now functioning, for his first specialist assessment, there is panic all around.
 
After endless tests, the specialists announce Joe's fate: his brain has been wiped out -- "severe cerebral palsy". He's blind, epileptic, quadraplegic, will never walk or talk, he will not even recognise his parents who, as they sit there receiving this onslaught of horror, barely recognise themselves.
 
The long road to hell and back, begins.
 
At first they are in such shock, and baby Joe so doped up, they crawl through their broken world, speechless. "It's like a death," says Alex. "It's like a never-ending wake," writes Nia in the gold notebook Alex had given her to write the baby's milestones in. Except now there are no milestones, and, just to make sure they realise the extent of their loss, both Nia's best friends give birth to "perfect" babies.
 
It's a Pakistani shopkeeper at the end of their road who first helps, telling Nia she is so lucky. In Pakistan she would have lost Joe; there would have been no drugs to save him. So Joe is precious.
 
Slowly, despair at the extent (catastrophic and irreversible according to the doctors) of Joe's brokenness is replaced with "an overwhelming need to heal", an urge "beyond sense and reason". Mother love kicks in.
 
Nia begins to make contact with alternative practitioners -- herbalists, homeopaths, reiki healers, and, of course, other stricken, mums. Her own mum, visiting her in The Rescue Foundation's little string of shingle cottages, each containing a mum and a damaged child, says it's "the most desperate place on earth she's ever been".
 
Nia's nights are spent trawling the outer reaches of the internet, as the doctors counsel that it's hopeless, that she and Alex are "in denial", and must learn to accept it, that the therapies and potions are "pie in the sky" and "unproven". When Nia tells the neurologist she has a hunch Joe would do better off some of the epilepsy drugs, she's told not to be "ridiculous". He will always be on them, they say.
 
But now the gold-covered baby book is crammed with therapies, patterning techniques, tapping techniques, light-on-light-off techniques, a frantic, 24-hour, 365-days-a-year struggle, to reach down the shattered neural pathways of their little "broken Buddha" and bring him into life.
 
Aged 18 months, Joe's first milestone is an unbelievable triumph: his brain waves test at the hospital show "normal". The "irreversible" epilepsy is no more.
 
A few days later Joe reaches out, deliberately, with his left arm, for the first time. "There is a spark," Nia writes in her diary.
 
Nia's astounding efforts to fan that spark into a blaze continue night and day, and aged two, as Nia stands over his cot watching him drift off to sleep, with huge effort, Joe lifts first one arm, then the other around his mum's neck. ("I never knew a hug could mean so much").

Joe continues to thrive. This little scrap, written off as incapable of ever even recognising his parents, for his sixth birthday choses to have, not a big family party as he usually does, but to go to hear Madame Butterfly with his mum, dressed in his favourite space suit. Oh yes, this is the most amazing story of love and perseverance.