John: Package Melody

This blog post has been taken from the end of a novel John has written that uses his own experiences. His wife, Julz, also publishes on Loss Through the Looking Glass and her own blog Beinghumanish. You can read more of John's work on his own blog Shaven Wookiee.

“Away with you all, dammit!

Mother?

Milk me now please.”

You have no idea how hard it has been to write this. I’ve been putting it off, and putting it off, but now here I am, having finished the novel, and all the internal mumbo jumbo, and now I want, or rather need, to talk about Melody.

We’re coming up to her first birthday (February 26th), and I’ve been wanting to do something myself for her for a while now. This novel is that thing.

As I write this, my wife Julz is pregnant with Melody’s little sister, who was measuring at four pounds at her last growth scan, over four times the size of Melody when she was born. So far, she’s healthy and well looked after by the hospital, although my wife is suffering quite a bit! I hate seeing her like this, but as she keeps saying it’ll be worth it in the end.

So, where to begin?

The beginning, I suppose, would be a good place wouldn’t it?

Melody wasn’t my first child. I had a daughter, Sophie, that was stillborn, when I was a lot younger and a lot less wise. What happened was the reason (or rather what pushed me over the edge) I started drinking.

But that’s a whole other story.

Julie and I had had two miscarriages prior to Melody, Alex and Castiel, and she has two absolutely amazing children from a previous marriage, Leah and JJ. She’s now going to Majorettes every Friday, and he’s still obsessed with trains (just ask him which is his favourite Thomas train, you’ll probably regret the lengthy answer. (Lol, just kidding).

Melody was conceived out of love. I know it’s a cliché, but it’s true. She was conceived on our blessing night (stop sniggering at the back), a special day for so many reasons.

She was trouble from the beginning, with Julie getting Hyperemesis Gravidarum (which is NOTHING like morning sickness as the British press would have you believe). It became worse after a car crash a couple months in, and she started showing signs of early pre-eclampsia a couple of months later, leading to lots of trips to the hospital until near the end of February 2012 when she was admitted until the baby was born.

Up until this point, I was scared shitless. I’d already lost one daughter, and was terrified history was going to repeat itself.

We had a tour of the NICU on the Saturday afternoon, just a brief look at what Melody would be staying in for a little while, and explanation about the sort of care she would have.

That night, Julie’s symptoms got worse and she was taken overnight to the Labour Ward, and I was asked to stay with her, which is unheard of unless something’s about to happen.

The Sunday morning, the consultant told Julie she wasn’t allowed to let Melody out unless she had read ALL the Harry Potter books (she was reading Prisoner of Azkaban at the time). But not long after I popped out to have some breakfast, he took a look at her bloods, and three minutes later returned, telling us he was “booking a cot” for our daughter. Little did we know, Julie was actually dangerously close to fitting because of the pre-eclampsia.

I was told to put some scrubs on (thankfully there are no pictures of that disaster), and some surgical wellies and was shown to the operating room. As a side note, the scrub nurse that was assisting the operation was heavily pregnant and fainted during the procedure! What a great start.

I think I was sweating the entire way through, from the moment the consultant said he would book the cot to when I got home late that night.

I had a daughter. A living breathing daughter. I shit myself. Not literally, but figuratively. Well, okay, maybe a little did come out.

She was put on a ventilator for less than 24 hours, which is amazing given how premature she was, and Julie’s pre-eclampsia and hyperemesis buggered off almost immediately, leaving her with the excruciating caesarean to deal with.

Hated seeing her like that.

Wanted so badly to be a Jedi at that moment, and take her pain away. All I could do was help in and out of the shower, and try and keep her spirits up (which was hard considering certain selfish people couldn’t keep their mouths shut).

The following Sunday Melody had an apnoea scare; we had only popped out for lunch with my mum when we got a phone call to come back asap. They were worried about her SATs dropping, and even started talking about sending her up to Bristol!

Thankfully, though, she bounced back an hour or so after, and she was back to her fighting self. It really knocked us for six, but we managed to get into a routine, coming to the hospital, sleeping at my brother’s whilst he was in Australia (just wish he hadn’t destroyed his fridge before he left); taking the kids to school when they came back from their dad’s; doing the run to the hospital with the milk for her; calling late at night before bed to check up on her.

We had lots of firsts (for me, anyway, Julie’s still managed not to ever do a baby’s very first yummy poop), changing nappies, doing bed baths, changing clothes and sheets, feeding her, and meeting other parents at the NICU with us.

I had just started my blog up not long before, and decided to do a random couple of blogs. Here was the first, Adventures in Poop:

So...

Melody’s now over three weeks old, and we’ve got involved in her cares and whatnot, and I’ve helped (at least a little) with expressing breast milk. We have had a wonderful team of nurses looking after Melody at Musgrove’s Special Care Baby Unit, and I can’t fault them at all. They’ve had us doing her ‘cares’ as I mentioned before; basically, we clean her, head to toe, use cotton bud sticks to clean her mouth and change her nappy! Therein lies the core of this particular post.

Poop.

Pooh.

Excrement.

περίττωμα (Greek).

excrementos (Spanish).

excrément (French).

Baw (Welsh).

pah (German).

Shit.

Either way, there’s lots of it coming from my tiny little daughter’s backside, it’s yellow, and it stinks! Yes, I know it’s supposed to stink, but it’s a bit of a shock when it comes from a person that weighs less than a bag of sugar, okay? When she was born, I had visions of holding her up to the sky and announcing her birth to the world, like at the end of Peacekeeper Wars.

Romantic, right?

Yeah, well, my experience has been somewhat different.

Yeah I know. But I do not begrudge a second. What? Why are you laughing? I don’t! According to the nurse, it’s to help us bond with her, and take the load (pun intended) off the nurses looking after her. I’m not really sure why they keep laughing at me when I say I’ll do her nappy. Is it a man thing?

My wife sat down behind me with a hand pump to express breast milk, and there was a smirk on her face.

This wasn’t the first time I’ve done her nappy, or an all-over bed bath, but what I didn’t know was that my ever-loving wife had already been informed by the nurses (who had sneakily taken a peak at the state of Melody beforehand) that she had a full nappy.

Thus began the Battle of the Poop.

So I opened up her nappy, and all the machines started pinging in random order. I swear it sounded like lasfire. There was some sort of work going on around the corner, one of the workmen using a large hammer that sounded like artillery. So now I’m in the middle of a warzone, and the nurse turns to me and says, “Get into it then,” like some cigar-chomping sergeant.

I felt like I had been handed a rifle and told to storm the enemy position.

I got the old nappy off, full to the brim with yellow alien goop, and was about to put the next one on when she decided to poop on her nice clean towel-bed-thing. I got the next one under her bum and she kept going. Dammit. I looked up and Special Care was gone, replaced by a grassy, muddy warzone. The ping of lasfire ricocheting around me filled my ears and every now and then the artillery would slam through the air and I’d instinctively duck my head.

Then my wife chuckled, and something hit the back of my leg.

I turned to find my wife holding herself and spraying milk on me.

The nurse, chomping on a cigar, said, “Looks like you’re getting flanked!”

Don’t tell me that! Get in a foxhole and help me dammit!

Melody started wriggling and fidgeting, the second clean nappy wasn’t going on properly. Now one of the other babies was crying and the medics were attending to her.

“Jesus,” I thought, “How the hell am I supposed to do this? I’m just a rookie!”

“You’re doing fine, son,” the sergeant-nurse bellowed over the noise, “just dig in and fight on.”

So I did.

The second clean nappy went on, got wrapped. The pings and hammering went on, the warzone going on around me. I had to wipe the sweat from my forehead and shout, “Will someone call in a fuckin’ airstrike or something?”

Then I remembered I was still in Special Care.

Oops.

Melody looked at me curiously, my wife was trying not to smirk, and I swear every now and then the nurse in question occasionally has a half- chewed cigar in her mouth even now.

So I’m mad, right?

What? Why are you all looking at me like that?

*        *        *

Yes, I’m quite mad, as it turns out. But I loved every minute of it despite my hands shaking, and feeling nervous the entire way through.

We managed to get cuddles outside of her incubator, and Julie got kangaroo care (skin-to- skin). Even Leah and JJ got to hold her hand, complete with hundreds of photos.

Her last week was one of extremes.

She had bloods taken (my wife called her a vampire, the big bully), and had another apnoea episode whilst she was being cuddled, going blue and scaring the living crap out of the both of us. And then the day after, she was bouncing around, and actually starting to hold her head and trying to turn herself over, even going so far as to actually start raising herself up a little on her knees. Because of that, I wrote the second blog entry:

Okay, so it’s been a week since the last blog, which has raised a few eyebrows, and raised a few questions:

“Was changing Melody’s nappy that bad?”

“What were you smoking when you wrote that blog?”

“Who the feth are you?”

and

“No, seriously, who the fething hell are you?”

Stuff like that.

Anyways, it’s been over a week since the infamous Battle of the Poop. So, yesterday the nurses had me doing the same thing, full cares, with my wife expressing behind me. I swear since last week the nurses have all started chomping cigars just to shit me up! So, my hands shaking like a blancmange in an earthquake, I dove in. The day before, she had had a blood transfusion, which naturally meant that that day was the day she was epically hyper.

I managed to get through the bed bath easily enough.

And then onto the nappy. I took the dirty one off, wiped her, and she pooped again. Got the second one on, and she pooped loads, all yellow and radioactive.

And thus began the latest episode madness.

I turned my head because my wife had chuckled at the sheer amount of poop. When I looked back, she had gone. There was a rustling sound and I looked at the top of the incubator to see her on all fours UPSIDE DOWN and wearing a Spider-man costume (although somehow she was wearing a nappy at the same time that I hadn’t put on her).

“Uh-oh,” I said.

She nodded at me and then extended her arm out, putting the two middle fingers into her palm.

FWIP.

Spider stuff hit me in the face, and she was swinging away, and out of the incubator, slinging strings of web across the big room.

“Come back dammit,” I shouted. Spider-Melody stopped and turned, and put her hand out again.

FWIP.

I fell back against the incubator, trying to scrape the web off my face. When I did, Special Care had been replaced by a New York skyline.

FWIP FWIP.

The web was slinging all around me as the nurses (curiously dressed in full NYPD uniforms) tried to grab Spider-Melody as she swung around the room. I looked down and realised I too was wearing a Captain’s uniform of New York’s Finest.

“Get after her dammit,” I shouted. “She’s making us look like idiots.”

The nurses all looked at me like I was mad, and I realised Melody (not Spider-Melody) was still in her incubator and looking at me with a little mischief in her tiny eyes. My wife was shaking her head.

“What?”

I swear, though, whenever the nurses change her bedding, I can see a little bright red and blue outfit under the sheets…

*        *        *

Yes, I have an overactive imagination. Have you read my books for crying out loud? This event took place on the same day the paediatric doctors told us our going home date, when we would be able to finally take her home and leave the NICU behind, at least temporarily. It would have been another six weeks, but they were certain, even excited about it.

And so were we.

But then the Thursday, she had the ROP test, where they test babies’ eyes for Retinopathy, basically holding the eyes open and looking into their retinas. The experience isn’t pleasant, to the point where they don’t tell the parents for fear of them watching.

In fact, we discovered that many babies, including several that were in at the same time as Melody, suffer as a result of the test, to the point where the staff are actually worried it might be meningitis. That’s how bad it is! And yet, it happens all over the country, and they know what it does, but dismiss it as the cause of any problems!

Unfortunately, Melody was one of the babies that suffered. Her SATs dropped to the point where they were talking about putting her back on the ventilator to help her breathe.

But she came through it. Sort of.

On the Saturday, we took JJ in to see her as Leah was at a friend’s birthday party; she was back to her normal self, except her SATs kept dropping. But we made plans for Julie and Leah to come in the next day to change nappies and feed her and clean her.

The Saturday night, we phoned up as normal, and were told she was struggling a little, and they were waiting for a doctor. They told us that the doctor wouldn’t be able to see her for three or four more hours (and we don’t know how long they were waiting before we phoned). Her SATs had dropped again, this time really low, and they were once again talking about a ventilator and antibiotics… but they had to wait for the doctor.

We phoned up early in the morning on April 1st (we didn’t get much sleep), and it wasn’t encouraging. Although they didn’t say anything was particularly, we decided to go over anyway, and dropped the kids off at their dad’s. Just as we were about to leave there, the NICU phoned and told us to get over IMMEDIATELY.

Needless to say, Julie drove at 90mph-plus to the hospital.

When we got into the NICU, they had banned anyone else from going in, and put up dividers around her cot.

We knew something was wrong when Melody’s paediatrician came over to us, and the staff were all red-faced and had puffy eyes. They’d all been crying.

The doctor explained to us what had happened in the night, what they had done to keep her going.

For me, history repeated itself.

“She’s not expected to survive.”

Our world came crashing down around us. She had been fine only days before. Julie almost shouted the word, “Why?” Neither of us could understand. I don’t think it really hit either of us until later.

We were shown to Melody’s cot where one of the nurses was keeping her heart going manually with her own hands.

We were sat down, and Melody was taken off the life support and put into our arms.

And for a second time in my life, I watched my daughter die in my arms.

I… I can’t explain what it feels like.

I don’t really want to either, to be honest.

It’s painful, and it still hurts to even think a little about it.

I’ve lost a lot over the years: friends mostly, and some of them not particularly peacefully. I’ve seen people die, and I’ve been physically hurt myself. I know, more than most, what pain is.

Losing a child, you can’t describe it, not properly.

We managed to gather the strength to get our parents and a couple others to come and say goodbye to her before she was taken to the morgue. We refused a post-mortem.

The next morning I was sick everywhere in the bathroom. I hadn’t slept well, and I’d got up early, gone into the bathroom, and just spewed. I think it’s called delayed shock.

For the rest of that day, I was spaced out, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything. I was sure Julie might slap me. Or leave me.

We had to go and see the hospital chaplain (who I wanted to punch for being so condescending), and register Melody’s death at the registry office (the woman we spoke to actually said to us that there’s always next time).

We discovered that she had been IUGR, which we hadn’t been informed of; we only found out because it was on her death certificate.

We got loads of sympathy cards and hundreds of messages on Facebook and Twitter. My mum insisted on coming back and making us lots of cups of tea, and she did it again on Melody’s Angel Day (we refused to call it a funeral).

We were told at the time that she had had something called NEC (Necrotizing EnteroColitis), although this was revised to an “infection similar to meningitis” after the Somerset Child Death Review panel.

I’m not going to go into how we were treated by certain people, despite the fact that I still want to deck them even now for how they’ve treated us (and still treat us). And I’m not going to go into how Melody should have survived, and why she didn’t.

As we approach Melody’s birthday, we’re both scared of looking in the memory box that Julie’s online friends put together to send to us. We’ve only looked in there once, and that was her Angel Day.

She’s our Angel baby, and our soon-to-be-born daughter is our Rainbow baby.

There’s a ray of light at the end of the rainstorm.

*        *        *

With this novel, I wanted to bring some sort of understanding towards grief and specifically grieving parents. There is a message to it, but I’m not going to start getting philosophical.

Besides, you may not get the same message as I had intended. But that’s the beauty of novels, isn’t it?

With this novel, I’m going to be giving any money I make from it (not just profit) to charity, specifically the Musgrove Park Hospital NICU’s Just Giving, hopefully towards their counselling team.

Sarah: The Story of Our Premature Twins

Our story begins on the 20th July 2012. I was 28 weeks pregnant with my twin girls. I had been getting regular pains all day at work (my last day!), but they were not too bad, so assumed that they were Braxton Hicks. In the evening these pains got worse, so I decided to call the labour ward, who advised us to come in to be checked. I had not yet packed my hospital bag, so was madly trying to chuck what I thought I might need in a bag just in case (it was my plan to pack my hospital bag that weekend ironically!). We got to the labour ward and were shown almost straight away into a room. I was connected up to the fetal heart rate monitor where we could hear two healthy heart beats.

I was then examined by one of the midwives, who, to my surprise told us that I was in fact 3cms dilated, with waters that were just about to burst, and the chances were that my girls would be arriving in the not too distant future. I was then put on a drip to slow down contractions and given the first of 2 steroid injections (to help strengthen babies lungs).

At this point it was quite late, so my husband decided to go home for a rest. I continued to have contractions every 5-10 minutes throughout the night, using gas and air as my pain relief. I was then given a second steroid injection twelve hours after the first. Laurie Gatehouse came down from the Neonatal Unit and talked us through what was likely to happen when my twins were born. We were told that I would need a caesarean section due to twin one (Grace) being breech.

At around 4pm on Saturday 21st July, my contractions seemed to get more intense and painful. I was examined and found to be 10cm dilated. Everything then happened in a bit of a blur, I remember Drs and midwives prepping me for surgery. It was very rushed and rather scary! But necessary due to the fact that I was getting the urge to push, which with a breech baby could cause a lot of problems!

After being given a spinal block, twin one (Grace) was born at 18:06 and twin two (Isla) was born at 18:11 using forceps, as she was stuck high up under my ribs! I was told that my early labour had possibly been caused by Isla’s placenta being infected, so the surgeons spent a long time cleaning me up, and all three of us were then given strong antibiotics.

When they were born, Grace needed to be fully resuscitated (scary!) but Isla was managing to breathe by herself. They were both stabilised in the operating theatre, by two teams (one for each baby) of Drs and Neo natal nurses. Once stable, we got a quick glimpse of them, as they were wheeled past us to make their way to the Neonatal unit. We were then told that the nurses would contact us as soon as the girls were settled. This took a few hours, but eventually my husband was allowed to go and visit our daughters (I was bed bound due to the Caesarean, and pretty dosed up on painkillers). My husband returned with a photo of the girls taken by the nurses.

Grace

Isla

I finally got to meet my babies the next morning, but wasn’t able to hold them until they were 5 days old.

The girls settled really well, and I got down to trying to produce some colostrum for them. After much boob squeezing from both my husband and I, I started to produce colostrum. The process of collecting this was very time consuming! I would be squeezing it out, while my husband sucked it up with a 1ml syringe and then took it down to the neonatal unit for the nurses to share between the girls. After 3 days the real milk came in and I was an emotional hormonal wreck! I just sat on my bed and cried, and when asked what was wrong, I replied “I don’t know!” I was told this is perfectly normal.

After a week or so, the girls were doing really well and were really stable, so they were transferred from the “hot room” (more intensive care) into the nursery. They continued to do well for the next week, both were on optiflow, which uses water vapours to push oxygen into their nasal prongs, making it easier to breathe. Unfortunately they both developed a chest infection, so were put on antibiotics to treat them. Little did we know, things were about to get a lot worse very quickly.

On the evening of the 1st of August, we received a phone call to say that Isla was not doing so well, and had been moved back into the hot room so that she could have a closer eye kept on her. We went in to see her, she looked asleep and settled so we weren’t too worried, so we went home to bed. We then received another phone call to tell us that she had had to go back onto the C-pap , which maintains continuous positive airway pressure in the lungs. We were told to rest, and they would contact us if there were any changes. We then received a phone call at 6am on 2nd August, telling us that Isla was now on a ventilator, and would need to be transferred to a different hospital as they suspected she had Necrotising Enterocolitis (NEC) and may need surgery.

NEC is a gastrointestinal disease which typically affects premature babies. The disease creates both an infection and inflammation in the bowels. The treatment ranges from stopping milk feeds and giving antibiotics, to surgery to remove the infected gut. Unfortunately Isla had an extremely severe form of NEC.

We waited all day to find out where Isla would be transferred to (we were told it could be Oxford JR, Great Ormond Street or Addenbrookes). Finally at around 6pm on the 2nd August, Addenbrooks contacted MKGH to inform them they had a bed for Isla. A transport team were then dispatched from Oxford (where they are based) and they made their way to MK to stabilise Isla for her journey. This took quite a while as they wanted to get a long line in, to make it easier to administer drugs during the journey.

Isla waiting for a bed in another hospital

Isla being transported in a very high tech transport incubator!

We then had to make the decision to leave Grace in MK (still suffering from a chest infection but otherwise stable) and make our way to be with our critically ill daughter in Addenbrookes. When we arrived, the surgeon spoke to us straight away, and told us that she would most likely need surgery to remove the infected parts of her gut. We were told that if they could, they would wait until morning, but if necessary they would have to operate overnight. We were then given a room just down the corridor for the night, where we tried to get some sleep (note the word tried!!) we did not receive any knocks on the door throughout the night, which was a relief!

When we got up in the morning we were informed that Isla would be going down to surgery, and that they were waiting for blood and platelets for her. She was then taken down to theatre, where they operated on her for around 3 hours (it felt like a lifetime!). When she returned, the surgeon informed us that he had had to remove a lot of damaged gut, and what he had left in there did not look great, but if he had removed any more she would have been left with short gut syndrome. We were told that our daughter was extremely sick and the next 48 hours were crucial. We got through the first 24 hours and were told that Isla’s kidneys were not working, which meant there was no urine output and she was swelling up due to fluid retention. It was then suggested that we have a naming ceremony for her, so the nurses contacted the hospital chaplain who performed a wonderful ceremony with all our family around her incubator (except for Grace of course who was doing well back in MK).

After a few days, we finally started getting wet nappies (we were so relieved we even took a photo!). Isla seemed to improve gradually, but seemed to be blocking her ventilator quite a lot. It turned out that this was because she was having fits, and now had a bleed on her brain. We were told that there was no way of telling how much damage this bleed would cause, but there would certainly be some kind of mobility problem for her down one side, due to where the bleed was.

We continued to hope and pray that she would keep fighting and would pull through. Finally on the morning of Thursday 9th August we had a knock on our bedroom door to tell us to come quick. Isla had blocked her ventilator and was being resuscitated. This was successful and she was then made stable again, until a couple of hours later when she did the same thing again. Her consultant looked at us and told us that this would probably keep happening and it was now up to us to decide if we wanted to withdraw her life support. We looked at each other and we knew that this was the end of her fight. We made the decision to turn off her ventilator after one last cuddle with both of us. Isla was disconnected from all her machines (apart from one drip containing morphine to keep her comfortable) and she sadly passed away in our arms, aged 19 days old. Although heart breaking, we felt a strange sense of relief, knowing that our baby was no longer suffering and in pain. Isla’s consultant informed us that her blocking her ventilator was her way of telling us she had had enough.

We had our last cuddles with our daughter and I carried her down to the morgue. We then packed up all our things and made our way back to MKGH where the wonderful nurses had screened off an area by Grace’s incubator for us to have some privacy and to be able to grieve for our daughter. It was very emotional, but seeing Grace helped to keep us strong and realise we had to keep on going for her.

During our week away with Isla, Grace had come on in leaps and bounds and was now wearing clothes and making her first noises!

Grace wearing her first item of clothing!

Grace continued to get stronger and we found that visiting her was really helping with our grief for her sister.

She started to make sucking actions, so I started to put her to the breast while being fed through her NG tube sometimes, so she would associate this with feeling full and eventually latch on. She started to show an interest in the breast but struggled to latch on due to her mouth still being so tiny. I decided to try nipple shields, which were a hit, and on the last day of August, Grace finally had her first feed from me (a lovely end to a terrible month).

Grace was then having 3 hourly feeds, every other feed she was put to the breast so as not to wear her out too much. When I was not there during the night, she was offered either a cup or a bottle of expressed milk. When Grace was successfully taking every other feed either from breast or bottle, she was then moved onto 4 hourly feeds, of which every feed would be breast or bottle with an NG top up if needed. She took a week or so to get used to having to work for her food, but something finally clicked, and we started to hear talk of going home! As Grace was still on oxygen, she was connected up to a downloadable sats monitor, which the community nurses (the nurses that visit when you are at home if you are on home oxygen) assessed and decided how much oxygen she would need to come home with. The oxygen was ordered and delivered the next day and on the weekend of 22nd September we stayed at the hospital for two nights (to get us used to having a baby to get up to in the night and have the support from the nurses if we needed it).

Finally, after a 64 day stay in NNU, Grace came home on Monday 24th September. Two weeks before the twins due date.

Bringing one baby home when you are expecting to bring home two was hard emotionally, but knowing that Grace is getting that much stronger every day has kept us going, and although I still re-live the week we lost Isla and I still cry for her, I know that Grace needs her mummy and daddy to be strong for her. We will celebrate Isla’s life every year on the day that we lost her and we will bring Grace up knowing that she is a twin, and if she ever wants to know, we will tell her the story of how her sister fought so so hard for her life.

Here is Grace aged 15 weeks (3 weeks corrected age) still thriving and getting bigger and stronger by the day.

Katy: Two Little Boys - Oliver & Matthew's Story

I met my husband Chris at salsa classes 5 years ago. We got married in April 2011 and decided we were going to spend the rest of the year doing things we really wanted to do before we had a baby! We went on an all out luxury honeymoon to the Far East, travelled around India by train, moved house and upgraded our totally battered old car. When Christmas came we felt we were ready to try and start our own little family. I was just starting to worry after our 5^th cycle of trying to conceive when shortly after our first wedding anniversary I got the elusive BFP - we were thrilled and so excited.

At the end of July came our first BIG surprise. I was massively worried about the 12 week scan as my close friend had had a missed miscarriage. So, when the sonographer said “Ahhh OK,” I convinced myself something was up until she turned round the screen and said “Well there's your baby..and there's the other one!” TWINS! We were totally shocked but really pleased. I was 29, Hubbie 32 ,no history of twins in either family, no fertility treatment, all in all no risk factors for twins. We told all our family the news that weekend. Everyone was ecstatic. A week later we saw the consultant who reassured us that they were DCDA twins (the lowest risk type).

My pregnancy was pretty text book and our 20 week scan showed 2 perfectly formed babies kicking each other! The only real problem I had was that I got very huge, very quickly, I'm naturally quite skinny so it really showed. I started to struggle with back pain and had to go for phsyio (off a gorgeous Irish guy unfortunately!) By 24 weeks I measured 35 and had put on 2 ½ stone, more or less only on my bump.

Therefore I didn't worry too much when after a busy day pram shopping at 24 weeks I started to get a crampy pain in my back. It wasn't dreadful but it was nagging and on Monday morning I rang maternity assessment to get it checked out as I had a busy day at work. They said that all sounded fine, that I wasn't leaking fluid or bleeding and the babies were still moving but If I wanted to come in for reassurance then I could. So I did feeling like a paranoid first time mother! Once there all looked fine, the midwives were all ready to send me home or rather back to work for an afternoon of teaching 8 year olds PE (!) but as a matter of procedure a Dr came in to check me out. This was then I was found to be 3cm dilated... then everything went crazy.

The hospital I was booked in to had Special Care but now NICU so I was put in an ambulance (blue lights sirens the whole lot) to go to the nearest place with 2 NICU cots that was about 40 miles away. I still felt O.K, everyone had told me labour was really painful, this couldn't possible be it, I was given drugs to stop the contractions with a view to having a rescue cervical stitch put in but they didn't work (I have since found out from my parents who are both Drs that these drugs have a very low success rate).

After a scarily short labour (with 15 medics in the room not what I had ever imagined!) Oliver Thomas (1lb8oz) and his younger brother Matthew Daniel (1lb9oz) arrived in to this world kicking and screaming, surprisingly loudly, at 8:55 and 9:16pm- They were perfect, I instantly fell in love with them and I glanced across the room to see them being taken over to the NICU.

I visited them twice that night, they were bigger than I thought they'd be and over the next few days they remained stable. I spent almost all day and night going from incubator to incubator. Their odds of survival were never great at around 25% but they made small amounts of progress. They were able to be feed  on my breast milk through a tube, have little cuddles in their incubators and hold our fingers. Their brain scans and blood tests all came back clear. They each had their own little personalities. Matthew was more chilled and Oliver a lot more boisterous!  The staff there were all amazing. My father in law used to be a neonatal- paediatrician and was so impressed by the standard of care which was really reassuring.

On day 5, Matthew took a sudden turn for the worse, his tummy swelled and he lost his colour, he was diagnosed with necrotising enterocolitis (a disease of the bowel common and often deadly in premmie babies) He was immediately put on high strength antibiotics and the head consultant rushed in from home. Despite the best attempts of the medical team he was taken off his ventilator in the early hours. We held him as he passed away and told him how much we loved him. He looked so peaceful as we gave him a wash, dressed him in some new clothes and tucked him up in a Moses basket.

The next morning and Oliver was still doing O.K but the staff were slightly worried as his temperature was varying slightly, as a precaution he was started on antibiotics and transferred to another hospital where they can operate on tiny babies with NEC. Sadly he got worse very quickly and that evening they had to operate. 

We followed his incubator down to the theatre where we told him what was happening and he squeezed my finger- It was as if he already knew. We waited for the longest hour of my life until the surgeon came out and said he had tried his best but that it wasn't enough.

Less than 24 hours after we said goodbye to his brother we said good bye to Oliver and gave him the same respectful death as we gave Matthew. Then all his grandparents came in and gave him a goodbye cuddle. Without his wires in he looked just like his Daddy.

I wanted to tell my boys story for a few reasons-

Firstly to highlight the risks of multiple pregnancy. So far they think they were premature just because they were twins. That I was carrying around the same amount of extra weight as a woman at term, that my body was tricked in to thinking it was time they were out and my cervix gave way. They were perfectly formed and big for dates. I'm fit and healthy and had no sign of any medical condition. If you are, or know someone who is carrying more than one.. make sure that you listen to your body extra carefully.

 I also wanted to say how hard it is being a mum of multiples on a neonatal unit. I still wonder if I spent the same amount of time at each incubator, did I hold them the same amount of times? It was very hard after Matthew had died walking past the incubator he had been in to see Oliver and stay strong for him. As well as the guilt of feeling that I have let them and everyone around me down I also have the guilt this brings with it.

But most of all I wanted to tell the story of my gorgeous sons and how, even for just a short week, they brightened my life and the lives of all those around them.  

Sleep tight my handsome chaps!