Every morning, Tracey Newman listens for the sound of her 19-year-old daughter’s footsteps — and every morning, her heart fills with overwhelming gratitude when she hears them.

It’s a sound she once feared she would never hear.

It’s the sound of life.

Her daughter, Isabelle Rigby, was born at just 24 weeks and five days, weighing a meagre 695 grams. She was born fragile with lungs so underdeveloped they could barely support her first breath.

“There wasn’t a day that wasn’t a fight,” Tracey said.

For 175 days, Tracey and her husband Simon sat beside an incubator in Princess Margaret Hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit — a ward supported by Telethon — watching, waiting, and hoping.

Not a single day passed without that haunting, unbearable question tearing through Tracey’s mind: Wha

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