When Becky's baby girl started sweating, vomiting and struggling to breathe while breastfeeding , she knew something was wrong.

But despite taking her daughter, Kirsty, to the GP numerous times, she was dismissed as "neurotic" and "unable to cope", a new book reveals.

Even when the six-month-old was finally referred to hospital for X-Rays, paediatricians wrongly diagnosed her condition as bronchitis.

It was only when she was close to death, lying limp and grey in her terrified mum's arms, that the true cause of her illness was diagnosed.

She had severe heart failure after "multiple heart attacks" - which she had suffered from 'silently', unable to communicate or understand them.

Kirsty wasnt gaining weight," writes world-famous cardiac surgeon Stephen Westaby in his remarkable book, Fragile Lives , published today.

"She had a pasty, washed-out look and a cough like a dogs bark.

In reality, this baby was suffering repeated small heart attacks with excruciating chest pain that she could neither communicate nor understand.

"The human body can be outlandishly cruel.

Stephen, from Oxford, operated on Kirsty following her ALCAPA (anomalous left coronary artery from the pulmonary artery) diagnosis.

He found the situation "even worse" than he had thought and, at one point, Becky and her husband were warned they would likely lose their baby.

However, in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to save the youngster's life, Stephen carried out a procedure that had never been done before in a child.

He made her heart smaller by removing almost a third of it, before stitching the organ back up until it looked like a "quivering black banana".

Amazingly, he saved his tiny patient's life.

Today, Kirsty is an 18-year-old, athletic student. She has been able to attend school, go to prom and spend time with her friends.

Her incredible story is one of many featured in Stephen's new book, which details some of the surgeon's most extraordinary and poignant cases.

Others include a woman who lived the horror of locked-in syndrome, and a man whose life was powered by a battery for more than seven years

They all include drama, emotion and blood (lots of it).

Having grown up on a council estate in Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire, Stephen went into cardiac surgery after watching his granddad die of heart failure.

He tells Mirror Online that, despite his passion for the speciality and his determination, he "never anticipated" he would even get to medical school.

But over the past nearly 40 years, he has become an acclaimed heart surgeon and pioneer, responsible for a number of significant developments in the field.

He invented a T-Y stent - dubbed the "Westaby" tube - to bypass damaged airways, and became the first surgeon to fit a patient with a new type of artificial heart.

The patient, Peter, died aged 69 after over seven years of "extra life". "He was the first to reveal the true potential of blood pump technology," writes Stephen in his book.

The surgeon, who has worked in hospitals in the UK and abroad, says he learned "very early on" that a lot of patients were being turned away for heart transplants.

"Although transplants were great for patients, a lot of others were being turned away," he says. "Very few people can have heart transplants.

"They need someone else to die to get their heart.

He says that, even as a trainee, he was interested in alternative options for the unfortunate patients who could not receive a transplant.

In his book, he describes how, as a student, he was called to assist an operation on a young car crash victim after drinking pints in the pub.

"Bad problem, both the injury and the beer," he writes in his book.

"Not so much the amount of alcohol - we were used to that - more the volume of urine to pass during a four-hour operation."

To get through the surgery without losing concentration or having to leave, he reveals how he used rubber tubing so his urine would run into his surgical boots.

He admits, at one point, he had to cough loudly to disguise the "squelching sound".

When you start doing any surgery, it is scary. It takes you a few months to get into," says the dad-of-two. "Its very taxing."

In subsequent decades, Stephen went on to save hundreds of lives, repeatedly taking chances and pushing the boundaries of heart surgery.

This was all part of being a pioneer, pushing the profession to its limit," he says.

Far from working nine-to-five, the surgeon spent his mornings, afternoons and evenings dedicated to his "day job".

To become a heart surgeon I believe you have to work continuously in the way I did in the old days," he tells Mirror Online.

"We had ward rounds at 5am, then wed operate at 7am.

Stephen would spend the rest of the day operating on patients, before going to the research lab. In the evenings, he'd return to intensive care.

"It needs that sort of dedication," he says.

Indeed, it was this dedication that saw him cut a conference in Australia short to rush back to perform life-saving surgery on Kirsty.

Stephen had been in the country for just 13 hours when he received a call from Nick Archer, his paediatric cardiology colleague at Oxfords John Radcliffe Hospital.

No one calls with good news at night, he notes in his book.

And he was right.

He was told that there was a sick baby with ALCAPA - a rare but serious cardiac anomaly - who desperately needed his help.

He later discovered that Kirsty - in whom fate had installed a lethal self-destruct mechanism" - had shown signs of distress within days of her birth.

Her mum Becky, who already had a three-year-old son, noticed beads of sweat were trickling from her baby's nose whenever she tried to breastfeed her.

However, a paediatrician dismissed the infant's symptoms, Stephen writes in his book, deeming the move an example of "p***-poor medicine".

Within a matter of weeks, Kirsty was sweating, vomiting and struggling to breathe during feeds. However, she had no temperature.

Her concerned mum repeatedly took her to visit the doctor, but was "deemed neurotic and unable to cope", according to Fragile Lives.

At the time, Becky's husband was working abroad, away from their daughter who had a "pasty look" and a "cough like a dog's bark".

After eventually managing to get Kirsty referred to a hospital for X-Rays, Becky was told that her baby was suffering from bronchitis.

Feeling desperate and certain that something "dreadful" was going to happen, she later took the "grey" youngster to another hospital.

But there, she was diagnosed with the same condition.

Now late at night, Becky demanded a further X-Ray. Shockingly, she was "told off for her unreasonable attitude," Stephen writes in his moving book.

However, after the scan, the mum finally had her fears confirmed.

Her daughter was found to have a massive heart, with medics having reportedly misinterpreted heart shadows on her X-Rays as fluid.

Kirsty was rushed to Oxford's specialist childrens heart unit. By then, she was very cold and suffering from severe heart failure, Stephen says.

While flying back from Australia, the surgeon devised an alternative technique for the operation in a bid to increase the baby's chance of survival.

After landing in the UK, however, he was shocked by Kirsty's condition.

"She was emaciated, with virtually no body fat, her heaving ribs and rapid breathing a consequence of her congested lungs, and her abdomen swollen with fluid," he writes.

He adds: Without immediate surgery, shed be dead within days.

Joined by his surgical team, Stephen opened up the baby's small body with a scalpel blade, an electrical saw and a rib retractor while her parents faced an anxious wait.

He describes in his book how he found her heart to be the size of a lemon.

Babies' hearts are typically the size of a walnut.

Stephen then goes on to explain how he replumbed Kirsty's heart's blood supply and removed up to 30 per cent of her organ in an attempt to save her.

Incredibly, the surgery was a success.

The operation "provided some of the first evidence that an infants own cardiac stem cells can regenerate heart muscle and actually remove fibrous tissue," Stephen says.

"Adult hearts cannot recover in the same way," he writes.

Speaking to the Mirror Online, the surgeon describes how he "always put the patient first", even if it meant the possibility of being sacked.

He admits he did things "off piste" and, when he didn't have the money to perform certain procedures, he would raise charitable funds.

I used to operate on everyone from premature babies in their cots to people all the way through to their nineties," he says.

"Every one is precious."

He adds that it takes a "special sort of person" - one who is extremely skilled, gutsy and empathetic - to operate on babies and children.

"I think you find it difficult every time you lose a patient, no matter how high risk they are," he says.

"I used to really hate having to go out of an operating theatre and telling [relatives] their loved one had died.

Stephen, who describes his own story as one of "grim determination", worked on around 12,000 patients during his career.

He estimates between 300 and 400 died earlier than they would have.

I did lose an awful lot of patients," he says.

"There are lots of cases that have stuck with me.

But he adds: "Very few heart patients die because the surgeon doesnt do a good job.

He says some patients suffer complications which aren't managed well, while the quality of the intensive care team can also have an impact.

Nowadays, surgeons' death rates are published. There is also a risk of legal action by grief-stricken and angry relatives, Stephen says.

This 'naming and shaming' culture, he claims, is having a negative effect on the profession and putting graduates off from going into heart surgery.

"It's a worrying time for trainees," he says, describing how there are "serious weaknesses" with the system. "Surgeons now have their death rates published."

He adds that this also means it's difficult to maintain consistent intensive care teams.

"There's a lot of agency nurses, people not familiar with protocol," he says.

Stephen, who established the Oxford Heart Centre in the 1980s, recently retired from surgery after developing Dupuytren's contracture, or a 'claw hand'.

"My hand was warped into the position in which I held the scissors, the needle holder, the sternal saw," the 68-year-old writes in his book.

Now, he is working in two "very exciting" roles, one of which involves a proposed Wellness and Life Science Village in Llanelli, Wales.

He is also medical director at the regenerative medicine firm, Celixir , which he says has made "very important" developments for people with heart failure.

Reflecting on his incredible career, Stephen, who lives with his wife, Sarah, 63, acknowledges that he "didn't give enough time" to his family.

He met his spouse - a "free spirit from Africa" - over an open chest in Accident & Emergency, where she was working as a sister.

Stephen has a 38-year-old daughter - by his first wife, Jane - and a 28-year-old son - by Sarah, as well as two young granddaughters.

I never gave enough time to my kids and my grandchildren," he admits.

But he adds that one of the reasons he wrote his book, "was so they could see why I wasnt with them as much as I could be".

Stephen appeared on ITV's This Morning today, along with Kirsty and Becky.

Viewers have since taken to social media to praise his "amazing" and "remarkable" work, with some calling for him to be knighted.

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