Diary Entry – 02nd September 2023

The big day!! The Beefs birthday, but I’m going to say something now which many do not say about there children’s birthday. It was one of the worst days of my life. A day I would like to forget. It is something that I have never really spoken about. To Lisa, me Mum, anyone. I turned down the counselling that the hospital offered to people who went through similar things to what we did on that day. I have sometimes used this diary entry as an avenue to occasionally talk about stuff that is not travel related. So i’m going to use this as my counselling session. I will take you through the day….. and how it started…

Lisa was already on the labour ward that morning as she had had another bleed on the Thursday and the decision was made on the Thursday that we were going to try and get her to next Wednesday so the hospital could plan everything and get what they need. We had Placenta Praevia Grade 4, it was pretty much the worse it could have been. Id stayed the night in the labour ward with her on a pull out bed. I spent my time between staying there or at the Van. So i waved her off and got to work and by 09:30 i’d had a few missed calls from Lisa. When i answered she said “you need to come back, i have had another bleed and they are going to do the emergency C section this afternoon”. So after a few seconds to realise what was being said, i felt bad having to back into work and tell them i needed to go the hospital again. They had been so good to me throughout the time, id had a few days off and stuff like that. By that point Lisa had been in hospital for 3 weeks already because the bleeds were getting worse and becoming more frequent. So they didn’t want to risk her having a full rupture and being 20 minutes away from the hospital as it it was bad after 10 minutes there would not be any point. It would be too late.

My downfall in life is that in times of intense stress or pressure my default setting is to be funny. I cant help it, it is my fall back mode. So when i got back to Leighton i walked back onto the ward. I was obviously a advocate of trying to get her to as close at 35 weeks. The hospital had always said 35 is the target, then we will feel better. So 35 weeks was almost 2 weeks away. The decision had ben made. So they came into our room and gave us the debrief, the first thing that surprised me was that there was about 5 people giving us the low down of what was going to happen. I suppose I was naïve as to the severity of what was going on. At 12 noon, we got told that they would have us in at 13:30. That 90 minutes went so slow.

At 13:15 they came into the room and said we may be getting delayed due to a potential emergency. But by 14:15 we were being wheeled across the corridor into the labour ward. When i said there was a lot of people in the briefing, let me tell you that nothing could have prepared me for how many people were in the labour ward. Almost 30 people from different sections of the hospital. There were anaesthetist consultants, paediatrician consultants, blood people. It was at this point i was starting to think that this may be a little more severe than what i was thinking.

All the people in there were really nice and did everything to put our mind at ease. Once stuff started going it was run of the mill. I was at Lisa’s head and we were talking about stuff. You don whatever you can to try and take your mind off the fact that 1 metres away several people have cut you open and have there hands inside of you trying to pull another human out of you.

At 15:40pm the Beef appeared, he cried and everyone was happy with his weight etc. When they are taken early the body is programmed to draw blood into places to preserve life IE heart and stuff like that. SO when he was born he was a bit pale but he just wasn’t ready to be born.

So that was the first part and all went well, as you can see at 15:54 Mummy was awake doing well and had seen the Beef for the first time. So he was breathing ok, a bit lazy but he was supporting himself and all seemed ok. We were on the home straight with one eye on the time it was the crossing the Ts and dotting the I’s then we can go from there and start making our plans as a family. It is worth mentioning here that at that point we had no idea about what our next 12 months had in store for us. Our life was about to change course because of the next 12 hours.
They took the Beef up to NICU as he was premature so they could do tests and everything and keep him under observation. A little time passed and i’m sitting there running out of things to make small talk about and time kept passing. One of the nurses came over and said how brave she had been and they were just on the top layer of skin with the stitches so i was made up. Looking forward to showing my Mum some pictures of us all as it was her 60th birthday party later on that night.

Another 10 or 15 minutes passed and i was getting a bit confused as to to why we are still in the ward, but they had called for some more blood, and some more blood and i remember looking at the floor by the people doing the surgery’s feet and there was blood dripping, not a constant flow but dripping every second and i thought that doesn’t seem right to me. They called for more blood and just thought they were topping her back up and then we would be out of there. I was getting twitchy, i just wanted to get out of the room now. I remember looking up at the light they shine down and seeing all the blood where they had moved it about and that weas pretty red as well. This was probably 25 minutes after they had said they were on the last layer of skin and i thought bloody hell, some layer of skin this is.

Lisa mentioned that she was starting to feel discomfort and a bit dizzy, they called for more blood. One thing i had been told is that i can be in the room with her so she wasn’t on her own but they did advise that if things take a bit of a turn for the worst then i would have to leave. You could tell that Lisa’s discomfort level was getting higher and the atmosphere in the rom just felt different. There wasn’t people moving about normally anymore, everyone was moving at a much faster rate. I think i knew something was going on, they called for more blood. It was at point i heard a nurse say words that will probably haunt me until the day i die “Let’s get Dad out of here now and get him a cup of tea and some fresh air”. It was at point that i was pretty much lifted up off my seat and taken out of the room by a couple of the nurses. I was taken over the corridor and the door was shut.

Then nothing.

I was behind 2 walls an more than 20 metres away and i have never felt so alone or scared in my life. I had loads of missed calls from family, whatsapp’s from Lisa’s family waiting for pictures of Mum and Baby. I was paralysed. I didn’t know what to do.

I rang my Mum and i just cried. Scared. I didn’t really know how the Beef was i honestly thought i was going to lose Mum. I thought to myself i cannot raise a baby on my own. I was then terrified for feeling like i had tempted fate by assuming he was going to be fine.

Before me and Lisa had met she was married and in a 16 year relationship living in Scotland so when she left to be with me, i think it is fair to say it did not go down very well. Awfully in fact, she had a 20 year old daughter who was very close to her. I had never spoken to her family, never met them, we were sort of cast aside and i totally understand that.

In my mind I was worrying thinking what if the first time i speak to her Mum and i had to deliver the worst possible news. It would be me getting the blame, I would have felt like id stolen her and then this. I was in the darkest place id ever been and i pray to god that no one ever has to feel like i felt during that 25 minutes. You assume the worse. You think the worst about everything.

After 25 minutes of being out of the theatre a nurse came into me. She sat me down, the only words i could muster up in between fits of tears was is “Is she alive?”. What is strange is it is almost a questions that you don’t want to know the answer to but the only question you can ask. She had advised me that she was alive but she was in a bad way and that they had to do a hysterectomy as it was the only way to stop the bleeding. We had already spoken about if they needed to do that then don’t worry about it as we were content with jus the Beef.

Lisa had lost 10 litres of blood. 15 years ago wouldn’t have made it, one of the things that saved her was a machine that catches the blood you lose, cleans it and then puts it back in. The nurse advised that she was losing blood as fast as they could put it back in. We had become quite close to a lot of the staff as we had seem them most days for a month or so. Some of them came into after and we just cried together. I got the feeling that it had affected everyone in the room. For nurses to come and cry with me. We will probably never know how close she was during that time but i get the impression it is closer than i would like to imagine.

After i knew Mum was through the worst of the surgery they let me see her off to Intensive care herself. I have never seen so many wires coming out of a person before. It made me even worse to see her like that. The staff on ICU asked me to give them a couple of hours to get her settled and let them get her set up etc.

So i made my way up to NICU to see the Beef… his platelets were low so he was pencilled in to have a blood transfusion at 10pm. Mum had to have a huge transfusion as well. At Leighton the ICU and NICU were literally opposite ends of the hospital.

The hospital put us in one of the rooms in the NICU so we could always have someone there with the Beef. After id been up to see the Beef, i just had to escape so i got in my car and just sat in silence. No radio, no music just in silence and drove to my Mums party went there for about 15 minutes and drove back. I just needed to escape and see faces that i knew.

When the hospital have incidents like this the lengths they go through to help bonding between Mum and Baby then made this card that i had to take to Mum in ICU and popped it by her side. It still makes me cry looking at this now.

I’d prayed like id never prayed before, i cried like id never cried before. You think mad things to try and do what you can to try and make everything ok. A funny one, which i did, to help the bonding process the hospital give you material shaped hearts so you can share your scent with the beef, they had given me to take to Mum so she could have his scent and then one to put on her so he can get her scent etc. Well after a few hours your supposed to switch them around. I always left the original one with Mum because whilst she was on her life support machine i would think what if it is his scent that is keeping her alive the thought of meeting him and i thought if i take that away then she may lose that extra little bit of strength needed to get through it. I found it hard to work out where to spend my time, if i spent too much time with Lisa i worried thinking what if the Beef thinks there’s no one there for him. And i wanted to be there when Mum woke up just so i could see her eyes. In ICU they had t o tape her eyes down, so i just wanted to see her eyes.

At about 11:20 i went up the the room i was drained i could barely even walk. I spoke to the staff and they said sleep is best thing for me. I didn’t sleep much just lay there with my eyes closed.

I think i drifted off for a few hours and woke up at 6am ish. I walked through to check on the beef, he had had his transfusion he was doing pretty good considering. They said that ICU had called up about 4 and asked me to take Mum her glasses down as she was drifting in and out of consciousness and the morphine wore off. The maternity unit said “Im not waking him up to get him to take glasses down”. TO be fair i’m glad they didn’t knock because if they had i would of assumed the worst.

Mum had one of those pipes in her through so she couldn’t talk but she wrote down in the middle of the night “Is Rich ok?” and “What did he weigh?” on about the Beef. And that sums up my super wonderful brave wife that despite going through what she went through the first thing she did was check i was ok.

Then 12 months later we are in our motorhome in the south of France. And it is like a very bad dream. Probably something i would nevevr ever really be able to sit down and talk about, it is just too hard to take myself back there and relive that again.