BRAVE West Fife toddler Daniel Cornet is continuing his road to recovery and has returned to his Cairneyhill home just two weeks after receiving a kidney transplant.

The plucky three-year-old still has to go back to Glasgow’s Royal Hospital for Children every two days for checks but mum Louise Paton and dad Nicky Cornet were delighted to bring him home last Wednesday.

“Basically, we ended up home two weeks earlier than I had predicted,” she told the Press. “The kidney has taken and it is doing its job. It is obviously really early and the first four to six weeks are the main period for post-transplant rejection so we are still only halfway through that.

“He is bouncing about like nothing has happened. I had no idea how he was going to be as everyone reacts differently. So far, so good. Everything has gone really well but it can change.

“It still hasn’t hit us yet what has happened I don’t think.”

Daniel, who won the Press Bonny Baby competition in 2014, was born with end stage renal failure and previously had to endure 10 hours of dialysis treatment every day to fight infection.

After months of tests, he received a live kidney transplant just five days before Christmas.

Little Daniel is now on medication to suppress his immune system and stop his body rejecting the kidney but this means there is a risk of him picking up bugs and infections.

“He has already managed to pick up a chest infection and any kind of little bug is going to knock him quite a lot,” said Louise. “Things are pretty stable and the kidney is happy and the job now is keeping him hydrated. He has got to take 2.2 litres a day and that is not just for now. That is ongoing and that is what he needs to keep going and keep things stable.

“We have dropped dialysis since the day before his transplant but he also had to be on a feeding pump overnight. We are still doing that but now we are also tube-feeding him every hour so he gets enough fluid.”

Although things have gone relatively smoothly since the life-changing transplant, Daniel did end up having to undergo yet another operation on Hogmanay.

“He needed an IV access line called a Hickman line put in,” explained Louise. “They had been trying to do things the conventional way but his veins have been so well used that they got to the point that they were taking seven attempts to get blood and it was too much.

“We got to the point where there was no other option – he was just like a pin cushion and enough was enough.”

Louise is hoping he may be able to return to nursery around Easter time.

“We will have to wait and see how he is,” she added. “We will have to get nursery staff trained up to feed him his fluids.”

As well as Daniel’s impressive progress, the relative who donated the kidney – who has wanted to remain anonymous – is also doing well.

“She was back at work two weeks and one day post-transplant which is amazing,” added Louise. “She is doing very well.”