midwife's muse

I'm so sad, I feel for that little being who I will never know, but my heart aches when I think about my daughter. I am so lucky to have never had to go through what she went through yesterday, and will carry on going through. At the moment she is so raw that she has shuttered herself away and is only speaking to her sister and me, and we feel absolutely helpless in the face of her emotional torment. After she had the worries early on, and then everything seemed to resolve, we thought it would all be OK. Even Fetal Medicine raising the issue of how small 'peanut' was did not trouble her that much, after all Jack was not a huge baby, and then once you get to 16 weeks you tend to believe that you  are in the 'safety zone'. On Friday she had bled slightly, but thought she felt baby moving, so was unconcerned, but then on Sunday night it started again, not huge but enough to concern her. The hospital made her a scan appointment for yesterday morning and told her to starve from midnight on Monday, I had told them that I couldn't hear baby's heart. I was working yesterday, and was in the middle of a clinic when I got the text from her saying that 'peanut' was dead, and that they wanted to do something horrible to her. I still had 4 patients to see, I contacted another midwife and asked her to come and relieve me as quickly as possible, but I still ended up seeing 3 of them. To be honest I don't know how I dealt with them, automatic midwife must have stepped in, because this midwife was sobbing inside. Anyway, I rushed off, found her and hugged her like I have never hugged her before. She showed me the scan photo they had just taken, it showed a perfect little baby, all curled up, it is just so difficult to believe that something so terrible had happened to it, it looked so right. I bought Jack home with me, I was so lucky to have him to cuddle tightly and snuggle up with. His Mummy had to be put to sleep whilst they took 'peanut' out, the mechanics of which I can't contemplate, this would have been her child, but for something that we have no explanation for.

We are trying to be positive, it could have happened later on and that would have been far worse. She just phoned me up and asked me to get a nice box to put the little bits and pieces about 'peanut' in, even if he's gone she will never forget her hopes and dreams about him. We may never have met but I will always remember my 'nearly' third Grandchild.

15.3.06 17:54