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For someone who’s had four heart operations – three of them before he was two months old – Charlie is in pretty good shape.

He whizzes around like your average three-year-old. If you didn’t know it, you probably wouldn’t guess he had a heart condition.

He’s stubborn, feisty and resilient – characteristics that are said to be common among heart children.

As a good friend of mine would say, he’s rock n roll. Even when he was a tiny baby, you could tell he had attitude. A real fighter, he took whatever was thrown at him and came back for more.

And he’s had more than his fair share hurled in his direction.

Charlie underwent his first operation at the back end of April 2005, aged 33 days.

He had to be transferred from Sunderland Royal Infirmary’s special care baby unit – his home for the first five weeks of his life - to the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle, where surgery would take place.

As the paramedics wheeled my son to the waiting ambulance that Saturday morning, two things occurred to me:

1 It was Charlie’s first time out of doors;

2 He knew nothing about it.

In preparation for surgery, Charlie was already sedated, his breathing controlled by a ventilator. The incubator housing him was secured in place and then he was gone.

They even held up the traffic on either side of the Tyne Tunnel for our little VIP as he was blue-lighted to his destination.

That afternoon, they cut his chest open for the first time. The long hours of waiting are as bad as you might imagine. Then the phone call came to say it was over, everything had gone well and we could go and see our boy.

The situation was complicated by the fact that Charlie’s twin brother George was due to be discharged from the special care unit the following day. We were taking one of our boys home. Joy amid the chaos.

So there they were. Two baby brothers. One ready to start his new life, the other just out of an operating theatre. Their mum and dad’s emotions going haywire.

But Charlie decided that this particular weekend just wasn’t crazy enough for his liking.

On the day we took his brother home, and less than 24 hours after his first heart operation, he needed another little trip to the operating theatre.

And one more for good measure ten days after that. (I’ll fill in the gaps another time).

He was a scrap of a baby. Scrawny, said the anaesthesiologist. But he cleared his first hurdle, and lived to fight another day.

He dealt with his subsequent battles inside the walls of hospitals and beyond in the same determined way.

Like I said, one tough kid.

The moment I entered the room and saw the doctor gliding an ultrasound probe across my newborn son’s chest, I knew something was wrong.

My twin boys had arrived the previous afternoon, delivered eight weeks early by Caesarean section. Everything had gone well, the boys were beautiful, and I went to bed on a wave of pure elation, as all new dads do.

The following morning, my new family was sucked into a whirlwind.

The doctor had seen enough. He turned away from the monitor he had been watching and came straight to the point. And how.

“I suspect your son has a heart condition. A big one.”

This after several antenatal scans at which he had told us perhaps there was a small hole in Charlie’s heart, one which might even close of its own accord over time.

He couldn’t have been more wrong. My son’s heart had formed minus one of the four valves through which our blood passes on its journey through the organ.

Without a pulmonary valve in place, Charlie’s blood had no way of reaching his lungs to receive oxygen.

The doc showed us a model of the heart, and how it should work. I was there in body but not in mind, unable to focus on his explanation.

The wheels were in motion, whether I was ready for this or not. A paediatric cardiologist was summoned from the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle. He confirmed the diagnosis. Pulmonary atresia with ventricular septal defect. In other words, an unformed pulmonary valve and a hole in the wall between the heart’s two main pumping chambers.

We hadn’t yet given Charlie his name -  he was still plain old twin one. But already they were talking about surgery. Soon. And he would need more throughout his life.

We had questions, such as: Was he going to die? No, said the cardiologist. How could the scans have been so wrong? Probably because scanning twins is not easy – with one in the way, it’s hard to build a clear picture.

We were told to prepare ourselves for a long journey, with many ups and downs.

I decided to put the antenatal scans to the back of my mind. It was more important to focus on Charlie, and the operation he would soon go through.

But it wasn’t only Charlie who was making the doctors concerned. His brother George (twin boy Fletcher two) had heart block, or slow heart rate, signifying a potential problem with the heart’s electrical circuit.

For our first full day as parents, it was plenty to take in.