BENJAMIN Begley is lucky to be alive.

He owes his life to surgeons at Southampton Hospital who performed heart surgery on him when he was just over an hour old.

His mum Kerry Gould from Stoke Abbott knows how much she owes to the team for battling against the odds to keep him alive.

She is also indebted to Ronald McDonald House for making a stressful time more bearable by providing a 'home from home' on site for Benjamin's family.

That's why even though Benjamin is only 12 weeks old she's been busy raising money to provide breast pumps for new mums staying at the home.

She said: "We were staying down there for a month while Benjamin had surgery.

"Ronald McDonald House has 53 rooms for parents to stay who have critically ill children at the hospital. It is fantastic, you don't pay to stay there and they have everything there.

"The only thing they didn't have were breast pumps. Although the house is on hospital grounds you still have to walk across the car park and past the accident and emergency department to get to the wards.

"At three and four in the morning when you need to go and express your milk it is frightening, and a couple of nights there were drunk people having fights outside and it is terrifying.

"So we thought it was something we could do."

And do it they did, raising £764 from a justgiving and Facebook campaign.

Kerry not only wanted to raise money but also awareness for the house which is funded by donations.

She was touched not only by people's generosity but by the messages of support she received from all over the world.

Benjamin was born with transposition of the arteries - meaning the left and right arteries coming out of his heart were the wrong way round - a condition picked up by Bridport Hospital at his 20 week scan.

Kerry said she also owed staff there a huge debt.

She said: "It is such a difficult condition for them to spot. Even at Southampton they said they only pick up 50 per cent of them so for our little community hospital to pick it up was fantastic.

"It would have been such a different story if they hadn't. He would only have survived a couple of hours

"The technical term for what he had is 'incompatible with life'."

Even knowing his condition doctors were surprised how poorly he was when he was born by caesarean section.

He was so frail they had to operate as soon as he was born to make a hole in his heart before his major surgery.

But his condition worsened and at six days old he started to give up.

Kerry and her partner David went to say their farewells, not expecting him to survive his seven-hour operation the

next day.

But against all the odds, he did and has been thriving ever since.

Kerry said: "He's such a little fighter, he's been such a trouper."