ALLISON was so weak after she had her third baby, nurses wouldn't trust her with the new arrival. "They wheeled my bed up to her incubator. I really wanted to hold her but they wouldn't let me because I was so full of drugs they were frightened I would drop her," says Allison Maxwell-Jones, leafing through an album of photographs of new-born Hannah at her home in Nunthorpe, Middlesbrough.

Allison, 35, and her husband Keith, 39, were so relieved at first that their third child was alive and well that they didn't notice the red mark on her right temple.

"I was supposed to have a planned Caesarian after 38 weeks but it didn't work out like that," says Allison, who had Hannah at South Cleveland Hospital in Middlesbrough, the same hospital where she works as an intensive care nurse.

Just before Christmas 1998, Allison was rushed into South Cleveland for an emergency delivery.

At first the doctors couldn't find Hannah's heart beat but after five minutes of frantic effort it was located. Two days later Hannah was born by Caesarian section, like Allison's two previous children.

Despite being six and a half weeks premature, Hannah was a very respectable five pounds, eight ounces in weight. But she was so weak she had to be fed by a nasal tube.

"When I first saw her she was the most beautiful little thing," says Allison, who didn't notice the small mark "like a smudge" on the right side of her head until the second day.

The doctors said they thought the mark was a reaction to the tube used to feed Hannah, but Allison wasn't convinced.

By the time her baby was a couple of days old it was obvious it was a birth mark. It was pale pink and covered a large area of her face, says Allison.

And by the time they took Hannah home on New Year's Eve, the mark had spread.

"By that time it had thickened and become almost knobbly," she says.

It was when Andrew, one of their two other children, first saw his little sister that it dawned on the couple the problems that lay ahead.

"Andrew asked me whether he could wash that mark off Hannah's face. That is when it hit me that this was something we were going to have to adjust to very quickly."

A few days later Allison noticed a pea-sized swelling under the pink skin, near Hannah's right ear.

"I was a bit scared to ring anyone because I didn't want to be labelled a neurotic mother," recalls Allison.

A midwife called and the family were soon back at the special care baby unit.

"They told me it could get worse before it got better. Next day the swelling was even bigger."

A few days later they went back in and saw a paediatrician. The mark was getting redder and hotter. "It looked like someone had spilt a tin of gloss paint over her face. It was really hot."

The paediatrician referred Hannah to a skin specialist who immediately identified the swelling as a haemangioma, a tumour of the blood vessels.

Common forms of haemangioma include port-wine stains and strawberry naevi, but less common forms can affect underlying tissue.

At first the specialist thought the problem was only superficial but as time went on it became obvious that the problem was more deep-seated.

"When I went back to see him a week later the swelling was distorting her face. At that stage he said it was a mixed type of haemangioma, with an abnormal growth of blood vessels in the skin and in deeper tissue," says Allison.

Steroid treatment was advised and as it started Allison and Keith did their best to find out more about the condition.

"It wasn't that we couldn't cope with this happening to our daughter, what was difficult to manage was why was this happening and what can we expect."

After five weeks her nose was pushed to one side, her right nostril was being squashed and her lip was twisting. Painful laser treatment was tried but had no effect.

After nine weeks, when scans showed that the growth could cause serious complications, the family were referred to Great Ormond Street Hospital in London.

With the couple's permission, specialists starting treating her with Interfon, a relatively new drug which is usually used on adult cancer patients.

"We were there for a couple of weeks. We came home with high hopes," Allison remembers.

A trained nurse, Allison gave her baby daughter the daily Interferon injections she needed - helped by her two children.

"Andrew, who is now eight, would get all the things I needed for the injections and Joanne - now eleven - would help to hold Hannah down and keep her leg or arm still. I'm very proud of them, I'm not sure all children would be able to manage this."

At first Hannah seemed to be responding but her condition suddenly deteriorated. "She seemed to be constantly in pain. Her mouth was bleeding when I fed her," Allison recalls.

After a routine check-up call from Great Ormond Street the family were on the road again. Hannah was in for three and a half weeks, pumped full of drugs and fed through tubes. After three and a half weeks she was allowed home.

A few days after Hannah celebrated her first birthday she became seriously ill with a chest infection. Within days she was on a ventilator at South Cleveland Hospital and the family were told they should prepare themselves for the worst.

But thanks to the "superb" treatment of staff, she pulled through and resumed her progress.

"She went from strength to strength. The day before she was 18 months she got her first pair of shoes. She never walked anywhere she just ran. It was as if she was trying to catch up on lost time."

With Hannah finally doing well, the couple began to search for more information about her condition on the Internet.

A chance contact with a family at Great Ormond Street led to an e-mailed correspondence with an American woman called Linda Shannon, who founded a group called the Vascular Birth Mark Foundation after her daughter was born with a large haemangioma on her lip.

She told the couple that her daughter was successfully operated on by a world-famous specialist called Professor Milton Waner, of Little Rock, Arkansas - who could probably do the same for Hannah.

"We sent an e-mail to Dr Waner. Within 48 hours we got a very encouraging e-mail back saying he was cautiously optimistic that his surgery would achieve a result where Hannah would look nearly normal," says Allison. "We were so excited."

A meeting with Dr Waner in London in November led to an offer to operate on Hannah.

The only problem was raising the tens of thousands of pounds needed to embark on what may be a series of major operations to reconstruct Hannah's face.

The family agree with Dr Waner that it is vital to operate early to spare the toddler possible psychological damage caused by her condition.

"She already looks in the mirror and knows that she looks different," her mother says.

That is when the couple took a deep breath, put caution aside and approached The Northern Echo.

"Apart from raising the money we wanted to raise awareness of the impact of disfigurement," says Allison.

"People are going to be aware that Hannah is here and she looks like this and it is not going to be such a shock to them."

Ultimately Allison believes that it is the strength of community spirit in the North-East that can help break down the barriers of prejudice. It is that spirit that has raised more than £30,000 in just a few days.

"We want to just thank everyone from the bottom of our hearts. It is quite amazing, " says Allison