I know I've posted on here about my losses but never in this section. I know they aren't as recent as some but I still would like to share my children's stories.
We found out we were expecting our first baby in September 2006, we'd been married for more than five years but hadn't planned to start a family. I was on the pill and hadn't missed any or been ill, so realising I was pregnant was a bit of a shock but once the news sank in we were really pleased.
My Dh was working away in the week and I did the test on a Monday morning and went to work feeling quite stunned. We were in the process of buying a house 250 miles away from Yeovil to Doncaster and I was about to give up my job in an estate agents office. Our mortgage adviser was in the car park when I arrived and she asked how I was and I blurted out "pregnant!"
I had a doctors appointment that evening and they confirmed my blood test results the next day, so that's when I rang DH to tell him the news and after that my parents. DH was shocked but pleased and my parents were over the moon.
As soon as DH got home at the weekend we went straight out and bought some baby things, white and cream baby clothes and the rocking moose from Ikea.
A week later I had a bit of a scare with some blood spotting but after a really horrible and upsetting day moving from two different hospitals and been treated really badly in the second one the bleeding had stopped and we were sent home and told to go back on Monday for a scan. DH couldn't leave work (he's in the armed forces) but I went and saw our baby's heartbeat, like a little flashing light, and fell in love.
We were so excited when they confirmed I was eight weeks pregnant (they had been unsure as I was on the pill) and said my due date was 18th May, my Dad's birthday.
We moved house and that meant that my 12 week scan didn't happen until I was 15 weeks pregnant. My Dh was commuting home at weekends and so my Mum came with me.
The woman who did the scan was awful, she was really rude and dismissive of my concerns when she put my pregnancy back from 15 weeks to 12 weeks and snapped at me that her machines were designed to date pregnancies much more accurately than my guesswork. She said the baby was too small to be 15 weeks and that I was obviously wrong about my dates.
She printed off a really bad scan picture but agreed to only put my dates back to 13 weeks. She never suggested a second opinion or raised any concerns based on the previous information or anything I had said. And since I had never had a scan before other than the first dating one when the baby was just a dot I didn't know that something was wrong from looking at the picture. Most scans at 12 weeks look like a fully formed baby and my poor Ally didn't.
The next few weeks went quickly, I finally got bigger and felt well. We had Christmas and my birthday and then my 20 week scan was due three days after that.
This time my DH was home and we went to the hospital really excited at getting to see the baby again. This was the first appointment I had had since the last scan and the first time my DH had ever seen our baby on the screen.
I was feeling fit and well and hadn't had any pains or bleeding, so it was a bit scary when the woman doing the scan, a different one to last time, started asking if I had been in pain or lost fluid or blood.
I said no and looked at DH and he was white and staring at the screen and I was craning around to try and see it too. The woman said "I'm sorry but your baby has no heartbeat" and our world fell apart.
She went to get someone to give a second opinion and this second woman confirmed that our baby didn't have a heartbeat. I couldn't understand why they weren't doing something that could get his heartbeat back, I was convinced that since the baby was still inside me then all they needed to do was get his heart started again and he would carry on growing as if nothing had happened.
When it started to sink in that he was dead I realised I was also going to have to go through labour and give birth and I shut down, there was no way I thought I could go through with it.
They took us off to a quiet room and I needed to go to the toilet but I was too scared to ask in case they thought I didn't care my baby had died. It just seemed such a normal and unimportant thing to want to do. In the end I told them and a nurse came with me and stood at the door, I think they were worried I would collapse or hurt myself or run away.
We saw a doctor and I took the first of the medication to help get me ready for labour and they told me I had to come back on Saturday morning for that. It was Thursday and I didn't know how they expected me to wait so long and it was the first time that my DH realised I would have to give birth. I was still waiting for someone to come in and tell me what they were going to do to find me a baby since mine had died, like they have a storeroom of unwanted babies just waiting for people like me to come along who have just lost one and take one of them instead.
And after an hour we were sent home. We told our families and they were heartbroken and we spent the night feeling shocked, crying a lot and just sitting staring at nothing.
The next day we went out and bought the tiniest outfit we could find, even though we knew it would be too big for our baby. The woman in the shop commented on how cute the clothes were and she must have wondered why we looked so awful and didn't answer her. I packed my hospital bag and cried over it because it should have been an exciting thing to do and instead it seemed to be a mockery of how I'd looked forward to doing it in a few months time.
I went into hospital at 10am and we had our son at 7:14pm. That was when we found out he was a boy, they hadn't been able to tell at the scan because he was curled up.
We weren't allowed to look at him or see him or hold him. The nurse took him away and promised to wrap him up in the clothes we had bought, which were too big to fit, and make sure the little tiger we gave him was with him to keep him safe.
They said he could have been dead for up to two weeks, which was why we weren't allowed to see him.
We had already chosen a name that would suit a boy or a girl, Ally, and it still felt right to use it for our son. We chose MacRae as his middle name because it is a family name of mine and my Grandad had it as his middle name. I'd wanted to name the baby after him in some way.
So Ally MacRae was born on 27th January at 7.14pm, our first son, and we couldn't have loved him more or been more proud of him even if he had survived.
We chose to have a hospital funeral mainly because we didn't know we had any other choice. It took six weeks for that to happen so by the time we buried our son I had already had to go back to work.
I think we were shellshocked right up until the funeral. It was a hard day and although I didn't know it at the time you could see on our faces just how shocked and upset we were for weeks on end.
We never found out why our son died, they did some tests but they didn't come back with any information to explain why he died.
It just seems so sad to me that a person so small can die before they are even born. How is it possible that someone can die before they had a chance to live even a minute in the world? I can't think about that without crying, even almost four years later it's breaking my heart and making me cry to type it here.
I wanted to talk to someone about it but I couldn't face going to a support group even if there had been one running in our area and when I looked online nowhere seemed right.
His loss was classed as a late MMC but to me it didn't seem right to say I had a miscarriage when I was halfway through my pregnancy and had given birth and held a funeral for our son. I didn't think I would find anyone else who had been through that on the miscarriage forums I found and yet I didn't think I would be accepted into the stillbirth ones either.
I just felt alone and like I was the only person who had lost a baby in second tri. So I didn't speak to anyone or join any forums.
We conceived again six months later and although this time the baby was planned, as soon as I got the positive result I cried. I felt like I was betraying Ally.
It was a worrying time, everyone was excited but scared and I was terrified that someone would tell me my baby had died.
At each appointment I was on edge waiting for bad news and although they organised lots of scans I was scared before I went in and only reassured for as long as the baby was on the screen. As soon as we came out I was on edge again thinking "well the baby was okay while we could see it but what about now?"
I lived for the scan appointments but at the same time I dreaded them.
This time though, things were different. The baby was moving a lot and looked like a baby on the screen, I got my bump and changed shape quite early and everything felt different.
On the day I got to 20 weeks I was really scared but the baby was fine, I could feel it moving and I was confident that things were going to be different.
But that afternoon we were involved in an accident when a lorry failed to stop properly at the set of traffic lights we were at and crashed into the back of our car.
I was hysterical, screaming and crying and convinced he had killed the baby. I was taken to hospital and examined and they said that the baby was fine.
But I wasn't. I felt ill from that day on and went back to the doctor complaining about back pain but they said it wasn't to do with the pregnancy, just pain from the accident. I felt more and more ill and worried but they kept insisting the baby was fine. I felt like I was getting the flu and I was tired all the time, had all the cold and flu symptoms and still lower back pain. I was too scared to take the paracetamol the doctor gave me because he said it would make the baby tired and slow it's movements and I was scared that would cover up something being wrong, like before with Ally.
Two weeks to the day from the accident and I was bleeding and back in hospital.
At first they were very positive and said that they felt the bleeding would stop and I could go home.
An examination revealed that my cervix had started to open and they started to talk about staying in hospital on bedrest.
My DH was called home from work but again that meant a 250 mile trip to reach me.
By the time he arrived things were looking bad. I was getting sicker and my cervix was open even more than it had been at first. They were starting to talk about an operation to put in a cervical stitch to try to keep it closed and then keeping me in hospital on bedrest indefinately.
That happened the next morning but after a short time in the theatre they had to admit defeat, my cervix was too far open and the stitch would not hold.
They took me back to my room and told me I would be there fore as long as necessary. The big hope now was that my waters wouldn't break until at least 24 weeks and viability but within half an hour of getting back to my room they had broken.
And that was it, they said that we were in a race against the clock now and that I would have to stay on antibiotics to prevent an infection because at that point it would mean they couldn't protect my baby any more.
I was still getting sicker and my temperature shot up. They kept saying I was tachycardic, which scared me because when they say that on TV it's usually bad but they explained it just meant my heart rate was fast. I think they knew that we were fighting a losing battle but they didn't want to tell me.
A doctor took my DH aside and explained to him that if the baby was born now it would not survive. We were just short of 23 weeks by then and were convinced if we could last just one more week we would reach viability and have a baby that was tiny but perfect and in with a chance. The doctor put my DH straight on that and said that a baby born then would not be the same as one born at 40 weeks except smaller and it's chances of survival were still slight. And then he said that he didn't think we even had that small hope though, they were waiting on my blood test results but were thinking I had an infected placenta and would have to have the baby the next day.
Which is what happened. I was so ill and my waters had broken, they expected me to go into labour properly that night but I was fighting and so was my baby.
So the next morning they said that they had to start the labour off properly themselves or we would both die.
At that point I didn't care, I would have died with her but I knew if I refused to co-operate they would make the decision for me.
They waited while I signed the consent forms and then told me that by doing this they had to fill in the forms for a late termination and that's when I broke down properly for the first time.
I couldn't stand it that anyone would think I wanted to end my pregnancy and I know that the statistics for these things don't care about the real lives and reasons behind them.
I went up to the same room that I gave birth to Ally in and it was a Saturday, just the same as before. Both times I had gone into hospital on a Thursday and it all just felt like history repeating itself.
I was in labour all day and finally gave birth to my baby at 12:02am on Sunday 16th December.
They told me she was a girl and the paediatric team checked her over just on the off-chance that they thought they could help. Sadly they realised very quickly that they couldn't.
We called her Elisabeth Grace and I was so proud to be her mum.
She lived for two hours and fifteen minutes and those were the best hours ever. She was beautiful, perfect in every way, just very small and it was hard to believe the doctor could be right about her not being fully formed when she looked so perfect.
We held her and talked to her the whole time and in the background we had the hospital TV on and it played O Holy Night. It makes me cry now every time I hear it but it was probably the most beautiful thing she had in her short life, so it's a very special song for me.
She was buried with her brother in a special service just for her in January. I was still very ill and it was a hard day for everyone but I was happy she was at peace with her brother and not still in the hospital.
Now we have Joseph and I am so proud of him, I couldn't ask for a more perfect baby, but I still miss his brother and sister and I would give anything I could to have all three of them safely here with me.
It's still really hard to accept that I lost two babies within less than eleven months of each other.
I miss them every day and even now it's hard to believe they are gone. I see Joseph reaching milestones and it hurts that Ally and Elisabeth never got the chance to reach them. We plan for his future greiving that they don't have one.
I like to imagine how they would have been as they grew up. For some reason I imagine them how they might have been as young adults more than as older children. I picture Ally as being tall, sporty in a cricket or rugby sort of way, with red hair and being at uni to study to be a vet and Elisabeth as tall and slim with red-brown hair, just finishing her A-levels and wanting a gap year before studying law.
I thought time would make it easier to cope with their loss but the more time that passes the harder it seems to be, the more unfair it gets. It's been too long since I had them inside me, too long since I held Elisabeth, too long since I said goodbye. I miss them. I love them. And I won't ever forget them.
Thanks if you managed to read this to the end.
We found out we were expecting our first baby in September 2006, we'd been married for more than five years but hadn't planned to start a family. I was on the pill and hadn't missed any or been ill, so realising I was pregnant was a bit of a shock but once the news sank in we were really pleased.
My Dh was working away in the week and I did the test on a Monday morning and went to work feeling quite stunned. We were in the process of buying a house 250 miles away from Yeovil to Doncaster and I was about to give up my job in an estate agents office. Our mortgage adviser was in the car park when I arrived and she asked how I was and I blurted out "pregnant!"
I had a doctors appointment that evening and they confirmed my blood test results the next day, so that's when I rang DH to tell him the news and after that my parents. DH was shocked but pleased and my parents were over the moon.
As soon as DH got home at the weekend we went straight out and bought some baby things, white and cream baby clothes and the rocking moose from Ikea.
A week later I had a bit of a scare with some blood spotting but after a really horrible and upsetting day moving from two different hospitals and been treated really badly in the second one the bleeding had stopped and we were sent home and told to go back on Monday for a scan. DH couldn't leave work (he's in the armed forces) but I went and saw our baby's heartbeat, like a little flashing light, and fell in love.
We were so excited when they confirmed I was eight weeks pregnant (they had been unsure as I was on the pill) and said my due date was 18th May, my Dad's birthday.
We moved house and that meant that my 12 week scan didn't happen until I was 15 weeks pregnant. My Dh was commuting home at weekends and so my Mum came with me.
The woman who did the scan was awful, she was really rude and dismissive of my concerns when she put my pregnancy back from 15 weeks to 12 weeks and snapped at me that her machines were designed to date pregnancies much more accurately than my guesswork. She said the baby was too small to be 15 weeks and that I was obviously wrong about my dates.
She printed off a really bad scan picture but agreed to only put my dates back to 13 weeks. She never suggested a second opinion or raised any concerns based on the previous information or anything I had said. And since I had never had a scan before other than the first dating one when the baby was just a dot I didn't know that something was wrong from looking at the picture. Most scans at 12 weeks look like a fully formed baby and my poor Ally didn't.
The next few weeks went quickly, I finally got bigger and felt well. We had Christmas and my birthday and then my 20 week scan was due three days after that.
This time my DH was home and we went to the hospital really excited at getting to see the baby again. This was the first appointment I had had since the last scan and the first time my DH had ever seen our baby on the screen.
I was feeling fit and well and hadn't had any pains or bleeding, so it was a bit scary when the woman doing the scan, a different one to last time, started asking if I had been in pain or lost fluid or blood.
I said no and looked at DH and he was white and staring at the screen and I was craning around to try and see it too. The woman said "I'm sorry but your baby has no heartbeat" and our world fell apart.
She went to get someone to give a second opinion and this second woman confirmed that our baby didn't have a heartbeat. I couldn't understand why they weren't doing something that could get his heartbeat back, I was convinced that since the baby was still inside me then all they needed to do was get his heart started again and he would carry on growing as if nothing had happened.
When it started to sink in that he was dead I realised I was also going to have to go through labour and give birth and I shut down, there was no way I thought I could go through with it.
They took us off to a quiet room and I needed to go to the toilet but I was too scared to ask in case they thought I didn't care my baby had died. It just seemed such a normal and unimportant thing to want to do. In the end I told them and a nurse came with me and stood at the door, I think they were worried I would collapse or hurt myself or run away.
We saw a doctor and I took the first of the medication to help get me ready for labour and they told me I had to come back on Saturday morning for that. It was Thursday and I didn't know how they expected me to wait so long and it was the first time that my DH realised I would have to give birth. I was still waiting for someone to come in and tell me what they were going to do to find me a baby since mine had died, like they have a storeroom of unwanted babies just waiting for people like me to come along who have just lost one and take one of them instead.
And after an hour we were sent home. We told our families and they were heartbroken and we spent the night feeling shocked, crying a lot and just sitting staring at nothing.
The next day we went out and bought the tiniest outfit we could find, even though we knew it would be too big for our baby. The woman in the shop commented on how cute the clothes were and she must have wondered why we looked so awful and didn't answer her. I packed my hospital bag and cried over it because it should have been an exciting thing to do and instead it seemed to be a mockery of how I'd looked forward to doing it in a few months time.
I went into hospital at 10am and we had our son at 7:14pm. That was when we found out he was a boy, they hadn't been able to tell at the scan because he was curled up.
We weren't allowed to look at him or see him or hold him. The nurse took him away and promised to wrap him up in the clothes we had bought, which were too big to fit, and make sure the little tiger we gave him was with him to keep him safe.
They said he could have been dead for up to two weeks, which was why we weren't allowed to see him.
We had already chosen a name that would suit a boy or a girl, Ally, and it still felt right to use it for our son. We chose MacRae as his middle name because it is a family name of mine and my Grandad had it as his middle name. I'd wanted to name the baby after him in some way.
So Ally MacRae was born on 27th January at 7.14pm, our first son, and we couldn't have loved him more or been more proud of him even if he had survived.
We chose to have a hospital funeral mainly because we didn't know we had any other choice. It took six weeks for that to happen so by the time we buried our son I had already had to go back to work.
I think we were shellshocked right up until the funeral. It was a hard day and although I didn't know it at the time you could see on our faces just how shocked and upset we were for weeks on end.
We never found out why our son died, they did some tests but they didn't come back with any information to explain why he died.
It just seems so sad to me that a person so small can die before they are even born. How is it possible that someone can die before they had a chance to live even a minute in the world? I can't think about that without crying, even almost four years later it's breaking my heart and making me cry to type it here.
I wanted to talk to someone about it but I couldn't face going to a support group even if there had been one running in our area and when I looked online nowhere seemed right.
His loss was classed as a late MMC but to me it didn't seem right to say I had a miscarriage when I was halfway through my pregnancy and had given birth and held a funeral for our son. I didn't think I would find anyone else who had been through that on the miscarriage forums I found and yet I didn't think I would be accepted into the stillbirth ones either.
I just felt alone and like I was the only person who had lost a baby in second tri. So I didn't speak to anyone or join any forums.
We conceived again six months later and although this time the baby was planned, as soon as I got the positive result I cried. I felt like I was betraying Ally.
It was a worrying time, everyone was excited but scared and I was terrified that someone would tell me my baby had died.
At each appointment I was on edge waiting for bad news and although they organised lots of scans I was scared before I went in and only reassured for as long as the baby was on the screen. As soon as we came out I was on edge again thinking "well the baby was okay while we could see it but what about now?"
I lived for the scan appointments but at the same time I dreaded them.
This time though, things were different. The baby was moving a lot and looked like a baby on the screen, I got my bump and changed shape quite early and everything felt different.
On the day I got to 20 weeks I was really scared but the baby was fine, I could feel it moving and I was confident that things were going to be different.
But that afternoon we were involved in an accident when a lorry failed to stop properly at the set of traffic lights we were at and crashed into the back of our car.
I was hysterical, screaming and crying and convinced he had killed the baby. I was taken to hospital and examined and they said that the baby was fine.
But I wasn't. I felt ill from that day on and went back to the doctor complaining about back pain but they said it wasn't to do with the pregnancy, just pain from the accident. I felt more and more ill and worried but they kept insisting the baby was fine. I felt like I was getting the flu and I was tired all the time, had all the cold and flu symptoms and still lower back pain. I was too scared to take the paracetamol the doctor gave me because he said it would make the baby tired and slow it's movements and I was scared that would cover up something being wrong, like before with Ally.
Two weeks to the day from the accident and I was bleeding and back in hospital.
At first they were very positive and said that they felt the bleeding would stop and I could go home.
An examination revealed that my cervix had started to open and they started to talk about staying in hospital on bedrest.
My DH was called home from work but again that meant a 250 mile trip to reach me.
By the time he arrived things were looking bad. I was getting sicker and my cervix was open even more than it had been at first. They were starting to talk about an operation to put in a cervical stitch to try to keep it closed and then keeping me in hospital on bedrest indefinately.
That happened the next morning but after a short time in the theatre they had to admit defeat, my cervix was too far open and the stitch would not hold.
They took me back to my room and told me I would be there fore as long as necessary. The big hope now was that my waters wouldn't break until at least 24 weeks and viability but within half an hour of getting back to my room they had broken.
And that was it, they said that we were in a race against the clock now and that I would have to stay on antibiotics to prevent an infection because at that point it would mean they couldn't protect my baby any more.
I was still getting sicker and my temperature shot up. They kept saying I was tachycardic, which scared me because when they say that on TV it's usually bad but they explained it just meant my heart rate was fast. I think they knew that we were fighting a losing battle but they didn't want to tell me.
A doctor took my DH aside and explained to him that if the baby was born now it would not survive. We were just short of 23 weeks by then and were convinced if we could last just one more week we would reach viability and have a baby that was tiny but perfect and in with a chance. The doctor put my DH straight on that and said that a baby born then would not be the same as one born at 40 weeks except smaller and it's chances of survival were still slight. And then he said that he didn't think we even had that small hope though, they were waiting on my blood test results but were thinking I had an infected placenta and would have to have the baby the next day.
Which is what happened. I was so ill and my waters had broken, they expected me to go into labour properly that night but I was fighting and so was my baby.
So the next morning they said that they had to start the labour off properly themselves or we would both die.
At that point I didn't care, I would have died with her but I knew if I refused to co-operate they would make the decision for me.
They waited while I signed the consent forms and then told me that by doing this they had to fill in the forms for a late termination and that's when I broke down properly for the first time.
I couldn't stand it that anyone would think I wanted to end my pregnancy and I know that the statistics for these things don't care about the real lives and reasons behind them.
I went up to the same room that I gave birth to Ally in and it was a Saturday, just the same as before. Both times I had gone into hospital on a Thursday and it all just felt like history repeating itself.
I was in labour all day and finally gave birth to my baby at 12:02am on Sunday 16th December.
They told me she was a girl and the paediatric team checked her over just on the off-chance that they thought they could help. Sadly they realised very quickly that they couldn't.
We called her Elisabeth Grace and I was so proud to be her mum.
She lived for two hours and fifteen minutes and those were the best hours ever. She was beautiful, perfect in every way, just very small and it was hard to believe the doctor could be right about her not being fully formed when she looked so perfect.
We held her and talked to her the whole time and in the background we had the hospital TV on and it played O Holy Night. It makes me cry now every time I hear it but it was probably the most beautiful thing she had in her short life, so it's a very special song for me.
She was buried with her brother in a special service just for her in January. I was still very ill and it was a hard day for everyone but I was happy she was at peace with her brother and not still in the hospital.
Now we have Joseph and I am so proud of him, I couldn't ask for a more perfect baby, but I still miss his brother and sister and I would give anything I could to have all three of them safely here with me.
It's still really hard to accept that I lost two babies within less than eleven months of each other.
I miss them every day and even now it's hard to believe they are gone. I see Joseph reaching milestones and it hurts that Ally and Elisabeth never got the chance to reach them. We plan for his future greiving that they don't have one.
I like to imagine how they would have been as they grew up. For some reason I imagine them how they might have been as young adults more than as older children. I picture Ally as being tall, sporty in a cricket or rugby sort of way, with red hair and being at uni to study to be a vet and Elisabeth as tall and slim with red-brown hair, just finishing her A-levels and wanting a gap year before studying law.
I thought time would make it easier to cope with their loss but the more time that passes the harder it seems to be, the more unfair it gets. It's been too long since I had them inside me, too long since I held Elisabeth, too long since I said goodbye. I miss them. I love them. And I won't ever forget them.
Thanks if you managed to read this to the end.
, thank you for sharing your story it can't have been easy to do so..you're so strong xx 
