Finally, we meet our son

Our baby was dead, and now I would have to give birth to him. I was terrified. But if I’d thought we’d go straight from the ultrasound room to a delivery suite, I was much mistaken. There was no room reserved – we’d have to wait our turn. They were very busy and we were not an urgent case!!! Whatever they had given to our baby had made me very sleepy and we lay out on the lawn in front of the hospital, where I snoozed on my poor husband’s lap for a good few hours. It was a beautiful day. The sky was blue and the sun was shining. I thought, how can it be so nice when we feel so utterly wretched?? The contrast was astonishing.

I gradually emerged from my stupor, and it was late afternoon and they still hadn’t found us a room. What the hell was going on? They then told us to go home and they’d ring us from there. Now I was terrified if I left they’d forget about us. How long can you have a dead baby inside you? I had no idea. But eventually a room came free and I got in that evening. But it was too late to induce me, they would have to do it the next morning instead. My husband, very reluctantly, left me and returned home. I slept fitfully. At 6am I wandered around the corridor and found a midwife willing to induce me.  Contractions began, and boy they were painful. I asked for pain relief and because we weren’t going to have a live baby, I could have morphine, via a pump which I could press a button and administer it myself. I’ve had this machine in the past when I’d seriously injured myself in my mid-20s, and it worked great then, and it did now.

Our baby, a boy, was born at 6pm the same day. He was just over a pound in weight. When I try to remember the emotions of that time, my strongest memory is of thinking ‘he wasn’t meant to be, he wasn’t meant to be’. He was perfectly formed with little hands and legs, but the oedema on his tummy was big and red. His face looked strange, as if he had Down’s. I knew this couldn’t be the case as the CVS had tested negative for that, but anyway I had never seen a baby at 20 wks gestation before, so I had no way of telling.

The midwives were very kind. I had no idea what to expect, but they wrapped him in a little blue blanket and put him in a little blue basket with a tiny teddy bear. He was weighed and measured, and they took pictures of him with his teddy bear which they put in a booklet for us. We spent the rest of the night with him, cuddling him and talking to him, and taking our own pictures.

We left the hospital the next day. Leaving him was the hardest thing. We’d requested a post mortem, so we knew we’d be back in a few months for that, but we asked the hospital to arrange his funeral. With that, we got in our car and headed home.