To introduce myself and tell my story

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   I'm Jody and for the next few days I am still 34 years old, I'm married and have a nine month old boy, our third baby.

In September 2006 we found out that we were unexpectedly going to have a baby.  We hadn't been trying and I was on the pill but somehow after a few days of feeling very ill I had a weird feeling that I was pregnant and did a test.  

It was positive and I felt more shocked than pleased at first.  My husband was working away for the week so I was on my own and I got ready and went to work in a bit of a daze.  I worked for an estate agent and we were buying a house ourselves so when I met the colleague who was also sorting out our mortgage and she asked me how I was I just blurted out "Pregnant!" 

After saying it out loud the shock started to wear off and I started to feel pleased, had the appointment at the doctors to confirm it, told Andrew and then our parents and everyone was pleased and excited.

Because I had been on the pill they gave me an early scan to date the pregnancy at set it at eight weeks.  Our baby was due in May, on my Dad's birthday.  

We moved house at the end of October, back to our hometown and this delayed my next scan, so I didn't get one at 12 weeks, it was at 15 weeks.  The woman who did the scan was rude and abrupt to me and she put my dates back by three weeks.  When I told her I thought she was wrong she became even more rude but did amend her estimate to just two weeks back.  To this day I am still sure she was wrong.

I'd seen scans before but not really understood at what point they were done.  My baby didn't look like the babies on the other scans I had seen but I thought it was too early in my pregnancy.  I didn't know that at 12 weeks a baby looks fully formed on a normal scan, mine just looked like twisted ropes and a fuzzy blob.  But the woman who did the scan seemed satisified so I trusted her as the expect.

Seven weeks later, at what they called my 20 week scan but I think was 22 weeks, my baby had died.  

I hadn't had any pain or bleeding, no sign at all that something was wrong.  They called it a late missed miscarriage but because I had to go into hospital two days later, have them do a sweep to start labour and then give birth to my boy after a nine-hour labour I tell people he was stillborn.  I feel it more accurately describes what happened to us.

Our little boy was born on 27th January and it was the best and worst day.  We were so heartbroken but still excited to meet our baby.  We chose not to have a postmortem because our doctor said that even with one we would probably be in the 75% of parents who just don't get a reason for why their baby died this way.  We decided that our baby had been through enough and we wanted him to be left in peace.  

We decided to try again after the three months we had been advised to wait.  Three months after that we had our BFP for our daughter Elisabeth.

This time we were very excited but also scared and my doctor at the hospital was amazing.  We were given no reason to think anything would go wrong but at 20 weeks we were involved in a car accident, a lorry hit the back of our car while we were stopped at a red light.  For two weeks I felt in pain and very stressed and kept being assured by the doctor that the baby was fine.  Two weeks to the day of the accident I started bleeding and went to hospital at exactly 22 weeks into my pregnancy.

At first they were very positive but an internal examination showed my cervix was open 1-2cm and they started to get a bit more serious.  My husband was called to come home (his ship was based 250 miles away from where we live and he was only coming home at weekends) and I was told I had to stay in bed.  By the time my husband arrived at the hospital my cervix had opened further and they were deciding that bed rest wasn't good enough.  They wanted to try a cervical stitch.

The following morning, Friday 14th December, I was assessed again and they decided the stitch had to go in.  I was taken to theatre and after a short operation, just half an hour, I was told that it wasn't successful, my cervix was opening and the sac was bulging down into it, they couldn't force it closed again or push everything back for fear of breaking my waters.

I was taken back to my room and told that the only thing now was bedrest in the hospital and hoping that I could get to 24 weeks.  Anything after that was a bonus.  

Half an hour later I told Andrew to ask if the nurse could bring me a bedpan because I kept coughing and leaking urine.  I even said I could smell it.

When she came in she asked if I had felt a trickle or a gush and I knew then she thought my waters had broken.  I said it was just little bursts when I coughed and she said I'd know if it was my waters because they gush out.  I felt relieved for a second until she added "and you would have been able to smell them." I looked at Andrew and we both knew then they had gone.  The doctor confirmed it shortly afterwards.

It was just after that that I started to complain of feeling hot and thirsty and asking for the radiator to be turned off and the window opened.  Andrew told me later it was freezing in my room by the time they had done that but I kept on complaining about the heat.  The nurses brought a fan and all of a sudden there were a lot more bags on my drip, which were antibiotics and something to rehydrate me.

We knew it was bad, we started to get lots of visits from doctors and the nurses never seemed to leave my room.  They kept taking blood samples and my temperature, told me I was tachycardic, which scared me because when that happens on TV they always get those electric shock paddles out but they explained it was just a change to my heartrate.

Through all this I could feel my poor baby still moving and kicking and I was desperate to keep her safe (although we didn't know she was a girl then) and so scared for her.

By the next morning they had the results of my blood tests back, I had an infection that had reached my placenta and was poisoning us both, 

They immediately stopped trying to keep our baby inside me and started to concentrate on getting her out.  We were rushed up to the delivery suite, the same room where we had our son not quite eleven months before.  They started me off in labour again and I was there for about 14 hours before our daughter was born at just after midnight on Sunday 16th December.  She was perfect in every way and survived for just over two hours before the fight just got too much for her.

I was ill for awhile after her birth but six months later we were allowed to TTC again and just over a month later I was pregnant for the third time.  I'd read so much, worked out my ovulation calendar  and paid so much attention to my body that I knew the day we conceived him that I would get pregnant if we tried that day, TMI but my breasts were so sensitive that it gave me a very big clue.  A couple of weeks later I was getting all the signs (biggest one being that the thought of a bacon sandwich made me sick) and a positive test confirmed it.  

I had to have another cervical stitch put in place at about 14 weeks and they took it out around 37 weeks.  Those were scary times but apart from a nasty case of indigestion pretty much the whole way through the pregnancy everything else went well.  Joseph arrived three days before his due date, my waters broke while I was using the toilet at 8am, so he was very organised.  It was a long labour, he didn't arrive until 2am the following day and only then because they used forceps and gave me an epiostomy (sp?), but he's here and he's healthy and that's all I could have asked for.

We don't think we will try again but we have our son and feel like we are lucky.  We will never get over losing our first two children but we are blessed to have Joseph and can't imagine life without him now.  

Anyway, this is long so if you read this far thank you.  I just wanted to tell my story and offer my support to anyone going through a loss themselves.  It's not something that ends once the baby is born, grief is an ongoing emotion that never leaves you but it helps to know that others can empathise through their own experiences. Thanks again for listening.

Edited by JodyR