I wrote this hours after he was born, it was shared over 32k times (and resulted in newspaper articles in two national newspapers). My little man made it because of my refusal to ignore my instincts.
My baby is just hours old but he's sound asleep so I thought I'd tell you our story whilst it is as clear as it can be in my head.
I've written on some of your status updates our story (we were pregnant after sixteen miscarriages and a stillbirth at 24+3 recurrently and had already had a stillbirth previous to that) but this is about the past week.
Last Wednesday I rushed to the hospital convinced my baby had died as I couldn't get them to move. Thankfully the hb was found but the sudden reduction in movement was a concern, so we moved to daily monitoring. The ctg trace on the following days was always fine after a while but we were on for considerable times and needed a scan every day.
Sunday we were admitted as I had contractions (I was 36 weeks) and by this point my movements were even further reduced. We spent the next few days very anxious as my gut told me something was wrong even though clinically everything was fine. Then for the last twenty-four hours (despite a fetal medicine scan on Monday that again showed us that everything was clinically sound) our baby was borderline bradycardic and now would only move if pressure was applied. I had known for almost a week something was wrong and no one was listening but this time they finally saw what I did as I reminded them after they said eight is still a good number of movements even with stimulation, that not for us when baby is usually 80+ movements.
We began induction this morning but my waters wouldn't break at 5.30am and took a long time to sort at 7.30. We began a drip at 10.15am and we spent much of the day moving position as the trace wasn't reassuring (there words as over fifty percent had decelerations). At 3.15 I was told it would be a long time yet as we were 2cm still. At 4.02 our beautiful baby boy was born into the world and I held my breath until he cried. Which he did. The paeds took him straight away and they made sure he was doing well which he is.
The point of this? Every mother should listen to their instincts, even if doctors do numerous ctg's, scans etc, sometimes clinical things aren't enough, only a mummy can truly know when something's wrong. Shout and scream if they have to. I did. If I hadn't been in hospital when the bradies started well it would of been a completely different story.
Seven years, sixteen miscarriages, a stillbirth and here is our little Or.ion Ru.di Be.au (full stop added).
Jessica. It's the hardest thing in the world, knowing something isn't right, not being listened to and your baby dying because of it. Twice it happened to me, the third time they still didn't want to listen but eventually did
