OLIVER Adams is alive today, thanks to his mother's maternal instinct.

The 17-month-old had appeared in perfect health when he was born last January. But at three days old, when he failed to wake for a feed, his mother Kelly-Anne knew something was wrong and refused to let him sleep on.

Oliver was suffering from a rare and deadly disease that has the opposite effect of diabetes. Instead of his body producing too little insulin to control blood sugar, his created too much, and without treatment would have proved fatal.

Mrs Adams, 37, who plans to take part in the Yorkhill Children's Charity Sponsored Walk in September to thank the medics who saved her son, said: "When he was born he seemed fine. On our first night home, I had a terrible night trying to feed him but that's just part and parcel of having a newborn.

"But then he went three or four hours and he wasn't waking up crying for a feed so I tried to force him on and he just wasn't interested. He was going limp at times and purple so I phoned for the ambulance.

"It was one of the hardest decisions I've ever had to make because when you make that call you are admitting something is seriously wrong.

"But one of the doctors said to me that mother's instinct is right; a lot of people might have let him sleep on and then we would have had a totally different situation because he would have had a seizure and ended up in a coma.

"Thankfully, when it happened, he was already on the table and they were able to work on him straight away."

Oliver spent the next eight weeks in the Royal Hospital for Sick Children at Yorkhill's neonatal intensive care unit.

Doctors suspected he had congenital hyperinsulinism, in which the pancreas releases too much insulin, causing low blood sugar, after a few days, but he was not formally diagnosed until he was four weeks old.

He was later transferred by air ambulance to a specialist unit in Manchester and in a procedure which saw him in theatre for 10 hours, surgeons removed almost a quarter of his pancreas in a bid to cure the disease.

After a few weeks, Oliver was weaned off all medications and sugar solutions, as his body slowly started to produce healthy levels of insulin.

Mrs Adams said: "I was too scared to say, 'is this him getting better'. I was terrified to utter it because I didn't want to tempt fate.

"Even now I struggle to say he's cured because it wasn't clear-cut and they had to leave a bit of the pancreas that was next to the bile duct. But it seems to have worked; he has no lasting issues."

Oliver still has to travel to Manchester once a year and to Yorkhill every three months for routine check-ups.

But despite spending more than a third of his life in hospital, the 17-month-old is now like any other happy toddler.

Mrs Adams, who is also mother to Luke, three, said: "All the way along I never asked about prognosis, I was just dealing with what was happening that day. I couldn't deal with what was going to happen in the future.

"At Yorkhill he was in the neonatal intensive care unit, where babies died and we saw that three times.

"We had a lot of dark days but we always tried to look for the positives."

She added: "It's a huge relief being able to live normally.

"He's such a placid, contended wee boy and his big brother adores him. He's like our wee miracle."

Mrs Adams and her husband now plan to take part in the Yorkhill Children's Charity Sponsored Walk in September to thank the doctors who kept her son alive.

The 10k walk takes place around Glasgow, taking in Yorkhill and the Southern General campus, on September 5.

Mr and Mrs Adams also hope to raise awareness of the Ronald McDonald House - a facility funded by public donations, which allowed them to stay close to their son during his fight for life in Manchester.