Skipping about in her floaty white bridesmaid's dress looking just like a picture book fairy, adorable four-year-old Clara Barker's radiant smile won everyone's hearts. With her rosy pink cheeks and melting doe-eyes, she drew even more admiring gasps than the bride, her aunty Sarah, as she pitter-pattered down the aisle behind her. The wedding at Burnley's posh Crow Wood Hotel and Spa meant just as much to Clara's mum and dad, Rachel and Tom Barker, both 38, who only months earlier feared she was going to die.
"After everything she'd been through, we couldn't believe she was actually able to be a bridesmaid," says Rachel, an internal comms manager. Born perfectly healthy on 22 December 2019, Rachel and Tom, a project manager, doted on their gorgeous little girl. And they were completely blindsided when, in February 2022, staff at her nursery near their Bristol home told them that they'd gone to change her nappy and noticed that Clara's thighs were yellow.
Rachel says: "I got a call from nursery staff and they said that when they took her nappy off, her thighs had turned yellow. We took her straight to the GP who said he was baffled, and that he had never seen such a thing before." He referred Clara to Bristol Children's Hospital, where doctors immediately ran a series of blood tests which revealed that her liver was failing.
Her life in grave danger, the little girl was immediately transferred straight to Birmingham Children's Hospital, to wait in the hope that a donor would .