#stillBORN - Ava's story

My husband and I decided to start trying for our first baby in Spring 2011.  We were very lucky and within a couple of months, I was pregnant.  I’m not sure I really believed it at the start but as the weeks went past, it started feeling more and more real.  I felt quite nauseous and tired for the first 16 weeks, but so happy and excited.  Obviously there were downsides but I loved being pregnant and, once the baby started kicking, it was so great to be able to feel it moving around.  I was still pretty nervous up until about 25 weeks as one of my sisters lost a baby at 12 weeks and another lost triplets at 25 weeks, but I always assumed that it would turn out okay in the end – bad things like that just don’t happen to you.

My husband came to our scans but not my midwife appointments as they were pretty standard – just a regular check.  At each one, our midwife did all the normal checks and told me everything was perfectly fine, completely normal – baby was developing as it should.  It was the most normal pregnancy I could have imagined.

At 36 weeks I stopped work.  I was pretty tired by then and looking forward to being at home preparing for baby.  I found it very strange not to be working as my career had always been really important to me.  But I couldn’t wait to finally meet baby, find out whether it was a boy or girl, and look into it’s eyes and see who we had made.  The nursery was all prepared, the cot was ready, all the clothes were sorted out and in their drawers, the car seat was installed and ready to go.  Just waiting for baby.

At 39 weeks, I went for my regular check-up with the midwife, by myself as normal as my husband was at work.  The baby hadn’t moved all morning but was always very quiet in the mornings so I wasn’t overly worried.  My normal midwife wasn’t there so another lady did the checks.  When she came to monitor the heartbeat, she kept moving the monitor around as it wasn’t picking anything up.  Eventually she got me off the bed and said it would be best for me to go get checked out at the hospital as her machine was quite old and wasn’t picking a heartbeat up.  I was worried but not panicking as these kind of things just don’t happen to you.  Of course it was just her old machine and everything would be alright.  She asked me if I had a car to get to the hospital and, when I said it was a short walk away, she suggested I get a taxi there, which I thought was a bit over the top at the time.  I phoned my husband from the cab but, when he asked if I wanted him to come home, said not to worry as it would all be over and sorted out before he could get back.  I could picture the conversations I would have to have with my friends about the scare but wasn’t it a relief that it had all turned out to be fine?

When I got to the hospital and told them the midwife hadn’t been able to find baby’s heartbeat, I couldn’t believe how quickly they whisked me through to a room.  I thought it would all be fine and everyone would have been making a fuss about nothing.  Even when the technician had to go find a more senior person after looking at the scan, I still couldn’t believe anything was wrong.  And when they eventually turned to me and told me that there was no heartbeat and that our baby was gone, my first thought was “How awful to be a midwife and have to tell people that.”  I couldn’t believe that, after 9 months of waiting for our baby, we would never get to meet her alive.  My baby couldn’t have died – how could this possibly be happening to us?  It wasn’t until my husband walked through the door with such a broken look on his face that I realised that I wasn’t going to wake up from this.  I so hope I never have to see that look on his face again.

My parents and my husband’s parents joined us at the hospital.  The midwife team there were wonderful, explained all the options and, when we decided I should be induced straight away, took me upstairs to the maternity ward.  I don’t know how we got through the labour but eventually our beautiful daughter, Ava Grace, was born on 12 January 2012.  Even then, there was still a part of me desperately hoping that it would all have been a mistake and that she would be born kicking and screaming.  Instead she was completely silent and still.  I can’t picture anything worse than that moment when I finally realised that our baby was dead and it wasn’t going to be alright after all.  It broke my heart to see my wonderful husband holding our little girl in his arms.  It should have been such an amazing occasion when we first got to meet her and instead it was the most heart breaking moment I could imagine.

Ava was blessed by the hospital chaplain who so kindly came out in the middle of the night to look after our little girl.  It was really important to me that our families got to meet her and that they would remember her so they all came in that night.  One of her aunties gave her a toy elephant that she’d bought for when she was born.  The midwives got her dressed and brought her into us in a moses basket.  We got to spend one night with our daughter and I barely slept a wink.  In the morning my lovely husband took our bags to the car and moved the car seat into the boot so I wouldn’t have to see it when I came out.  We held our daughter one last time, and left the hospital with our arms empty.  Leaving that room, and leaving our daughter all alone, and walking out of the hospital and not going back was the hardest thing that I have ever had to do.

Over the weeks that followed I cried endlessly.  I never knew that grief could be such a physical pain.  I so wish that we had been able to meet our daughter alive, look into her eyes and see her soul.  I feel so cheated that we had her for 9 months only to have her taken away from us so soon before we were to get to meet her for the first time.  It felt so awful and unfair not to be pregnant anymore, but not to have our baby with us either.  I still feel like I should be able to change things and bring her back.  I still find it hard when I get happy birth announcements when we instead had to write a very different email to our friends.  However, we were lucky in some ways.  We have a wonderful group of family and friends who looked after us, talked about Ava with us and got us through the worst times.  I don’t know what we would have done without them.

Since we lost Ava, we have been incredibly lucky to be blessed with two more children, a girl (Jessica) and a boy (Ben).  My pregnancies with each of them were completely terrifying and I found myself in the hospital multiple times being reassured by the midwives that my baby was fine and their heart was still beating.  In neither pregnancy could I quite believe that my baby was going to arrive safely, so they were very different to my innocent, carefree first pregnancy with Ava.  However, they both did (after what felt more like 9 years than 9 months) arrive safely. Ava is still very much part of our family though – we have pictures of her in the house, talk about her a lot and Jess and Ben know that they have an older sister in Heaven.  We spend time at the cemetery with her, especially in the summer when the weather is nice and we can sit up there with an ice cream (to the extent that I think Jess now associates her sister with ice cream!)  Through it all, our family and friendly have been incredible and have kept us afloat – all in all, we consider ourselves very lucky.