Lachie is a 17-month-old toddler from Brisbane who has had a rough year.
Parents Shannon and Charles Gracey told Mamamia their little boy has an unresolved gastrointestinal bleed.
“His doctors can’t figure out what is causing it. For a normal kid it probably wouldn’t be as big a problem but Lachie has haemophilia,” said his mother Shannon Gracey.
The Brisbane mother is a symptomatic carrier of haemophilia and was told when she was pregnant that there was a 50/50 chance that her son would have haemophilia.
"Usually females carry the gene and pass haemophilia on to their boys but there are cases like ours where the female’s clotting factor is also low and classed as haemophilia."
Haemophilia is an inherited bleeding disorder where the blood doesn't clot properly. The blood does not have enough clotting factor and that's a protein in blood that controls bleeding.
"Unfortunately Lachie is in a bit of a grey area for treatment as he is only classified as a mild haemophiliac even though he has severe bleeding episodes," says the Brisbane mother.
"Mild haemophilia usually requires very little treatment. Severe sufferers would have a port put in to be able to easily administer the clotting factor for treatment, but this is not a normal course of action for mild haemophiliacs," she said.
"This means that we are unable to treat him from home and any time there is a bleeding episode, we need to take him back in to emergency," she added.