A year ago today, we heard the words that
our baby daughter had died. I had just reached 37 weeks’ pregnant and we’d only
put the cot up earlier that week because we thought it was safe to assume all
would be well.
As the news sunk in, the wonderful lady who
became our consultant needed to discuss with us what happened next. It was
quite late on Sunday evening and induction wasn’t an option, but the situation
wasn’t an emergency as nothing more could be done, so didn’t warrant a
caesarean there and then. So, after some deliberation, we decided that we would
rather go home and come back in the morning. The problem was, we were both so
shaken up that they didn’t want me to drive home again so we were stranded
quite a distance from home. Thankfully, my husband’s best friend arrived within
the hour and rescued us – and the first thing she did was throw her arms around
us both as she met us in the car park. It was so utterly brave of her to walk
into that situation and remain calm; I have no idea if she cried when she left
us, but she never faltered as she drove us home, offered to make us tea or
something to eat and checked that we would be ok before she made her way home.
Once she’d gone, neither of us could face
sleeping in our bedroom where the cot and all the baby things were laid out so
we took a sofa each and dozed in and out of sleep, listening to the tick, tick,
tick of the mantelpiece clock until 7am came around. My older brother, Matt,
came to collect us and drove us back to the hospital where we were settled into
the bereavement suite we’d briefly visited the night before.
The hours that followed are a blur with
midwives, an anesthetist and the consultant visiting, together with the
bereavement midwife – who handed us a memory box for use once our daughter had
been born. It was a gift I didn’t want to accept; as if accepting the box was
tantamount to accepting that there was no coming back from this. Instead of our
baby, the box would be the only thing we would be taking home.
I had pleaded for a general anesthetic
because I couldn’t face the thought of the deafening silence in the operating
theatre as they delivered our girl. When my son had been born seven years
previously, there had been happy voices and my favourite music playing as he
was laid next to me on the bed – blinking and gazing dozily into my eyes. A stillbirth robs you of all that joy – there is
nothing to look forward to – the delivery is a functional operation – not the
celebration you had envisaged only days before.
Florence Frances arrived into the world at
11:58am on Monday 3 August weighing a very normal 7lb 2oz. I was out cold and
didn’t get to see her for a couple hours but in that time, the midwife did as I
asked – washing and dressing her, wrapping her in the blanket I’d bought and
settling her in a specially-chilled moses basket. My first hazy recollection
was of coming round and asking to see her. Through the fog of anesthetic and
morphine, I looked down at the baby in my arms and none of it seemed real. I
don’t know what I had expected in my mind’s eye – perhaps that she would be a
carbon copy of her big brother – but I was struck by her thick, dark curly hair
– she was the absolute spitting image of her daddy.
Of course, many people forget the father in
all this. I may have been the one undergoing the surgery, but I am so sad that
we weren’t together when he held her for the first time. I am thankful that my
brother stayed with him so he wasn’t alone, but the whole situation was not in
the natural order of things – you shouldn’t welcome your child into the world
only to have to say goodbye. It was utterly unfair. Why us? Why our daughter?
