Mother’It’s tough seeing other babies.

Father’Yeah.

Mother’You know, I go to a mums and toddlers’ group, and it’s a very difficult position to be in, because parents of other babies or parents that are pregnant don’t realise how many problems there can be, and how many different problems there can be that result in the same thing.

It’s not their fault, it’s not your fault, but sometimes you’ve got to – you know, I continued and went to the mums and tots’ group. It’s very easy to hide yourself away, it’s very easy for you to say, ‘Well, I’m not going to go out anywhere I can meet parents or children, because I can’t face to talk about this. Or ‘Oh, when’s your baby due? Oh, I bet you’re looking forward to having your baby. Is it a boy or is it a girl?’ Or, nobody ever says, ‘Is it okay?’ or, ‘Is everything all right?’ Because they just assume everything is going to be okay.

Father’One of the things people —

Mother’That was hard.

Father’– quite often, I mean it’s a standard response to a question when you’re expecting, people say, ‘Oh, what do you want, a boy or a girl?’ And the standard response people give is, ‘Oh, we don’t really mind as long as everything’s okay, as long as it’s happy. And that’s sort of just a throwaway comment, isn’t it, people say. It’s just a platitude they come out with. When they’re actually faced with the possibility that things aren’t always okay, that can be very, very difficult.

Mother’And also you’ve got to consider other peoples feelings because somebody will stop you on the street, a friendll stop you on the street who you haven’t seen for some time, ‘Oh, I see you’re pregnant. Oh, wonderful, you know. What are you expecting?’ You know, they don’t need to listen.

Father’Yeah. They don’t necessarily want your life story, do they?

Mother’And also you’re not always in a position to feel – because if you haven’t seen them for a long time, then do they really need to know? Because they’re going to go home thinking, ‘I shouldn’t have asked that.

Father’They then beat themselves up because they’ve asked a question, and they think they’ve upset you. They haven’t upset you, because you’re already upset. You can’t be upset any more by somebody coming up and saying, ‘Oh, have you had the baby, then? What did you have, a boy or a girl?’ ‘Well, we had a little boy but he died.

And they then go away and think, ‘Oh, I’ve really upset them. And it’s, you know, it’s not their fault, it’s, everybody says that to you. And they haven’t upset you, because you’re already upset.

And they insisted that I went for a natural birth, which I had sort of four weeks to go and they wanted me to wait four weeks, and I said I wanted a caesarean as soon as possible. And they said that with the prognosis that they’d given me for her, they just didn’t stand much of a, they didn’t think, they didn’t really give her a chance, and they said that having a natural birth wouldn’t hurt her any more than what she is anyway. But they did, they booked me in for a caesarean the week after, so I had a week.

Because you pressed for it?

Because I pressed for a caesarean. Even though I was very, I wanted a natural birth and I’d planned my birth plan, but I thought with finding that out, I thought it would do her more damage if shes got a very sensitive head anyway. So I did ask for a caesarean, and I pressed for a caesarean, and they booked me in the week after.

What kind of support did you get from your GP and midwife at this point?

My midwife was very good. She was always popping in and different things. And on the day that I actually had, I actually had to go in on the morning, my midwife came to see me. And then once I came out of theatre she actually came down and saw me again.

And she actually bought me some pictures down of her, because I could only see her for a quick minute before they whisked her off. But my doctor was very good as well, he was very good. Otherwise I think the support I got off my GP and my midwife and my health visitor, that was very good.

And we had a couple of bad experiences in the middle. I mean, I wasn’t coping very well with the pain, but that’s, you know, a very subjective experience, because nobody knows the pain I was feeling, and I don’t know the pain anybody else is feeling.

So really, nobody can say, ‘You’re not coping. But the midwife actually spoke to a doctor in front of me, and said, ‘Shes not coping very well with the pain’, which made me feel I was a very bad person. And I’d tried everything. I’d had paracetamol, pethidine, baths, TENS machine, epidural, absolutely everything.

The epidural was fine, but nothing was happening. And after about, I think it was about 7 o’clock the next evening, so I’d been through the whole day in labour, about 7 o’clock they decided to start giving me I think it’s Syntocinon [oxytocin], which speeds up the contractions. And it started fine, and then suddenly they decided to increase the dose because it wasn’t, again it wasn’t working.

You know, the baby was desperately trying to get out and I was still only 2 cms dilated. So they upped the drug, and my husband went off to phone my sister to tell her what was going on, so she could tell everybody. And the baby’s heart suddenly stopped beating because he had a massive problem, obviously, with this drug that was I guess speeding up, trying to speed up my contractions, trying to speed up the dilation of the cervix, but the baby clearly reacted badly to this and his heart stopped. And all hell broke loose in the middle of the room, you know, there were people running around all over the place shouting for doctors.

My poor husband was standing at the lift in the hospital making a phone call, and the anaesthetist came and grabbed him and said, ‘Were going for an emergency caesarean. So he came rushing into the room. And at this point it had all died down, because they’d stopped the Syntocinon, I’d sat, you know, they’d sat me up in bed, or no, laid me down, got me in the recovery position and the baby’s heart had suddenly started to pick up again. Now obviously, the thing I was concerned about was the fact that the baby had a problem with his heart and it had stopped, so those two things combined were a little bit scary.

And I think at that point they’d decided to go for an emergency caesarean, but the baby’s heart rate picked up, so they said, ‘No, well let you try for another 4 hours to see if you can get this baby out naturally. I was actually very excited by the prospect of an emergency caesarean at this point. Anyway, I had an epidural so I’d had a little bit of sleep, but still I was incredibly tired, because it was now Saturday evening and I hadn’t slept since Thursday night.

And I did ask several times if I could have a caesarean, you know, would they consider it? And I kept being told, ‘Well, we think we should try for another 4 hours. We don’t give caesareans based on family history. It’s much better for you to have this baby naturally, so let’s keep going. And at that point, I was quite happy to do so because the epidural was working quite well.

Then suddenly it stopped working and the pump on the epidural box failed, and an anaesthetist came up to try and fix it, and said it was working absolutely fine and he left. And I was still in absolute agony, and I kept saying to the midwife, ‘Can you please do something about this? I’m in absolute agony’, you know, my hips felt like someone was dislocating them.

You probably don’t really want this on your tape, it’s putting people off having babies. But eventually some, another anaesthetist,

We got over there probably about eleven o’clock. They did another scan and they found out that his heart had slowed right down, and that they couldn’t wait to induce me. So they brought me straight into the operating theatre as soon as I got there, did an epidural, got that working.

And I can just remember sobbing my heart out. I mean, I was absolutely terrified – not for myself but for my son, thinking that hes only thirty-three weeks and the longer he stays in there the bigger hell get, the more likely he is to survive. I mean, I literally, I remember sitting on the bed and I was sobbing my heart out, while they were trying to put this epidural in my back.

And at ten past, nine minutes past twelve – I, wed only been there an hour and ten minutes – my son was born. And I remember when he was born and I couldn’t hear anything, and they took him away – because I was, you could feel the sensation of them pulling about my stomach. And after a couple of minutes – and obviously you don’t know what they’re doing down there – but I just remember saying, ‘I haven’t heard him cry. And one of them just shouted, ‘Oh, don’t worry, hes fine. But they’d taken him off. He had to be revived. He was very blue.

So hed already gone at that point?

He, well, hed gone over to the other side of the room where they revive them, sort of there. And I said to my husband, ‘Look, just go over and check that hes OK. Because even then I couldn’t hear him crying, and it wasn’t, he was doing this like whimpering sound. It wasn’t a proper hearty cry, and it was just awful, it was awful. And then my husband went over, had a look at him, came back and he said, ‘Look, hes fine, they’re just sort of getting him ventilated and everything now. And then they brought him over.

As they were walking out with him to take him, put him into the incubator, they just walked past me with him. And he looked – I sort of said, ‘Can I have a quick look?’ and they just sort of put him down. I couldn’t hold him or anything, but they just showed me him, his head, and he, it was just this mass of black hair and it was just, it was wonderful. Most amazing thing ever. And then they took him off. They took a photograph of him and they bring it up to you, because obviously I’d had a Caesarean so I couldn’t go straight down.

But wed said to our family not to come up. We didn’t want our family up there. And I remember my sister-in-law coming up with a bag of clothes, because obviously we weren’t expecting to be there, and she sort of looked in and she said, she says to this day, ‘I always wondered what I was going to find, with you, when I saw you. But she said, ‘The first thing that I’ – because everyone was saying, ‘Oh my God, how’s she going to be? Shes going to reject him and shes not going to want him. And shes so, going to be depressed’ or whatever.

And she said, ‘I always remember looking into the room and saying, ‘I’m not staying. I’m just dropping off your bag of clothes” and she said, and I just looked around and said, ‘Hes just the most beautiful thing – and she knew.

Father’I mean, they had, at the end of the labour suite they had another room set aside that was quite nicely decorated and it had a proper bed in it and a cot and a television. And something I hadn’t realised, they actually invited me to stay that night and I stayed in the hospital that night with my baby and my wife, and that was very good. That was very important. I mean, they made a camera available to us.

Mother’They did his hand and footprints.

Father’Yeah, they took his hand and footprints onto a piece of card.

Mother’A lock of his hair.

Father’A lock of his hair. They did like a little keepsake book. And we were going through all this and the midwives were all very good and we realised, we – it suddenly hit us, with all the photographs and everything that wed done, and we looked at our watches and we realised it was quarter past one in the morning. We thought, you know, ‘Where on earth has the time gone?’ But we had that time in this sort of little, almost like a little hotel really, wasn’t it?

Mother’Yeah.

Father’I’ve stayed in worse hotel rooms.

Mother’Yeah. We carried our baby out the next day.

Father’Yeah.

Mother’And took him —

Father’Just as —

Mother’– home in the car.

Father’Yeah, just as everybody else who’d given birth on that labour ward had done. And that was good, it was very dignified. But people came to us. I mean, we made some outrageous requests, or what we thought were outrageous requests and they just turned up. You know, stuff happened. And that was absolutely fantastic. That, you know, they all knew what we were going through, and they knew that things were going to be very difficult for us, so they tried to make it as easy as they could.

Mother’And I’ve kept all the clothes that he wore. He had a lovely smell, that lovely newborn baby smell, which is still here with us. Then he was dressed separately to rest him. But I’ve got all his clothes, all the things that I made for him, because if hed have gone into the special care baby unit I didn’t want blankets and that that they’d provided. I wanted all my own stuff that I could bring home, which was important.

They’re your keepsakes. They’re your baby. Although I haven’t got my baby, I do have the clothes that he wore, and that’s the best thing I’ll ever get, so treasure them. Mine haven’t been washed. They’ve still got his scent on, and they’re not going anywhere, they’re at home with me.