'Doctors said my baby was dead - then he lifted his head'

'Doctors said my baby was dead - then he lifted his head' Clarissa Mansbridge was told she had an hour with little William When Clarissa Mansbridge gave birth to her son William three years ago, doctors believed he would not survive the day. Born at just 33 weeks following a placental abruption, William was stillborn and had no heartbeat for 26 minutes before doctors managed to resuscitate him. Even then, Clarissa's ordeal was only just beginning. Just half an hour after his birth, doctors delivered devastating news. “The doctor told me: ‘You have an hour with him, you need to call your entire family, every organ has shut down. He needs an MRI, but we are expecting it to show he is globally brain dead’,” said Clarissa, 34. She waited an agonising 45 minutes for news. But when she eventually held him for the first time, he appeared to lift his head and look straight into her eyes, despite being heavily sedated. "That's what kept me fighting, because I saw that light in his eyes,” Clarissa, from Brisbane, Australia, said. William was diagnosed with severe hypoxic ischaemic encephalopathy, a brain injury caused by a lack of oxygen at birth. Although his MRI showed less damage than doctors had expected, the outlook remained bleak. Clarissa said she was repeatedly warned that if he survived, he may never walk, talk, sit, stand or live independently, and that he would require around-the-clock care for the rest of his life. At one point he was put into palliative care and at another a doctor warned her to prepare herself for finding him dead in his cot. For weeks, William remained in intensive care before showing signs of improvement and being transferred into high dependency care. While staying at Ronald McDonald House close to the hospital, Clarissa received repeated calls in the early hours of the morning after William suffered terrifying episodes where his oxygen levels and heart rate plummeted without warning. "I was called at 2.30 in the morning, and they said they had lost him, but they've managed to get him back again,” she said. The episodes happened over and over again. "His oxygen would go right down from 100 to 30 within seconds... his heart rate would drop down to the 30s. That happened 16 times every two hours, like clockwork." Eventually William was transferred to a specialist paediatric hospital, where these episodes remarkably stopped. William was discharged in October, two months after he had been born, and the pair went home for the first time. But caring for him alone, single mum Clarissa struggled with fear, anxiety and PTSD. “I would constantly check his monitor, and zoom in on the baby monitor to see if he's breathing,” she said. “I remember lying in the bath, and I had an iPad up, and it was just watching him 24/7 over the camera. I honestly wanted to just drown at that point.” But against every prediction, William continued to improve. Today, aged three, he walks, talks, runs and loves construction vehicles and dinosaurs. Apart from some hearing loss, he lives much like any other child. "Every single day this kid surprises me. Every single day. I am so blessed,” she said. Early on, Clarissa knew she could never return to the demanding entertainment career she had built over 15 years managing celebrities. So, sitting beside William's hospital bed, she had started filling a notebook with ideas for a completely different future. “In the hours when I couldn’t even touch my own child, I had to think about the future. About money and about what kind of work could sustain us regardless of how complex his needs became,” she said. “I knew that if I needed to be there for him 24/7 for him, I would need a very flexible working schedule. That’s when I found AI.” So Clarissa built Mia Andre, an AI-generated influencer built around luxury lifestyle content. She carefully built storylines, locations and experiences that unfolded naturally rather than posting random glamorous images. The strategy worked. Mia recently finished 2nd in the ‘Oscars of AI’ The Fanvue x OpenArt AI Personality of the Year Awards and today Clarissa earns around 6,000 US dollars a month (£4,500) while working around William's childcare. While Mia attracts brand attention in her own right, Clarissa said the account had become a portfolio for her wider creative work, with companies commissioning bespoke AI content tailored to their own audiences. But more importantly, she can juggle the work with being a mum. ”My favourite thing is that my phone is no longer glued to my hand,” she said. Now Clarissa is happily juggling her work alongside motherhood and gradually getting rid of the anxiety and fear of those early days. William’s second birthday, she said, was especially emotional because survival beyond that point had once seemed impossible. But today, she is reassured by his strength and speed. "His third birthday just feels like a blessing,” she added. “I can’t wait to see what he does next.”