Four-month premature baby Zoe Ireland and her parents arrived home in Tennessee on Saturday after an anonymous individual donated €30,000 for a medically-equipped charter flight to the US from Dublin.
Jenny and Gavin Drake were flying home from an extended business trip in Scotland last October with their son Aidan when Ms Drake went into labour just over halfway through her expected term of pregnancy.
The aircraft was diverted to Dublin Airport and she gave birth to Zoe, who weighed just 1 lb 13 oz, at the Rotunda Hospital.
Due to the child’s fragile medical state the family were not permitted to bring her home on a commercial flight as microbes in the plane’s air system could make her sick. The Drakes were told it would probably be about a year before they could bring the newborn back to the US.
The cost of living in Ireland, away from the family optometry business in Murfeesboro Tennessee, was proving a huge burden on the Drakes, who instead set up a crowdfunding campaign in an attempt to raise the €60,000 needed for a medical charter with the required breathing apparatus for Zoe.
It raised €31,000, and when the couple made an appearance on the Ray D'Arcy show on RTÉ Radio on Tuesday an anonymous male donor from Ireland volunteered €30,000 to make up for the shortfall.
The offer was gratefully accepted, and the Drakes arrived back in Murfeesboro on Saturday.
Zoe was taken to nearby Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital immediately after touchdown where she was put on a course of antibiotics while doctors carried out tests to make sure she was healthy enough to return home.
“Now that we are kind of to the end of it, we can call it what it really is, which is a blessing. It’s been a crazy, traumatic, wild blessing, but it has been a blessing,” Ms Drake told local news.
She expressed relief at being home, and once again thanked Irish people for their generosity.