I HADN’T previously shared the news with readers of this column that my husband and I were lucky enough to be expecting an addition to our family.
We’d passed the major hurdles, so we thought, and had told family and friends that we’d be welcoming a brother or sister for our daughter in spring.
In the course of an afternoon, however, our lives changed.
I attended a routine appointment with Claire my midwife, expecting to be home again in half an hour or so, but when her final check of the day failed to locate a fetal heartbeat, she decided to send me directly to Basingstoke hospital.
I decided not to alarm my husband by telling him, and drove alone in a stupor to the hospital, where the day unit staff soon discovered that our baby had recently died.
It was at that point that I utterly crumbled, before getting it together enough to call my husband and parents, and, over the course of the hours I waited for the next step, to text the news to our closest friends.
By the grace of God, our daughter’s godfather Tom was in the vicinity and came to wait with me as I tried to process the news that I would have to return to the hospital in two days to go through labour to deliver the baby.
Over a dreadful weekend, my husband and I prepared for what was ahead, trying to process the implications of our ‘late miscarriage’ – this term is for legal purposes only, and doesn’t quite communicate what anyone who suffers one has to endure, which is, to all intents and purposes, a stillbirth.
We found ourselves having to make decisions about what would happen to our baby once he or she had been delivered.
And I tried to process that I would have to go through this labour, only to be confronted by utter sadness at its conclusion.
Our baby son was born at almost 4pm on a Sunday in the Sands Suite at Basingstoke, under the care of our wonderfully empathetic bereavement midwife, Amy.
He was absolutely perfect and had died because of a horrible freak occurrence - his umbilical cord had wrapped itself tightly around his neck twice.
Thanks to the Farnborough branch of Sands, the national charity for stillbirth and neonatal death, we were able to take home a beautiful memory box containing his handprints, footprints and photographs.
It’s something we will treasure for the rest of our lives, and we’ll use it to one day tell our daughter about her lost brother.
I know that the healing process will take time. But, for now, I feel like a different person.
Something in me changed forever when I felt his little body leave mine, and it is as if a part of me is missing.
I feel utterly brokenhearted that we lost our little boy in this way, and were powerless to save or protect him.
Farnborough Sands can be found online at farnboroughsands.co.uk. Alternatively, call 07792 239 593.
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