Ten years ago we were at the end of a very happy, problem-free pregnancy. Our first baby! But life doesn't always go as you expect it, and one Thursday afternoon, 5 days before my due date things felt different; quieter. We casually headed down to St Mary's hospital.

What happened next was quiet simply shattering. The baby we had waited so long to meet - our son Bear - had died, the result, we later found out, of a failed placenta. 

The searing pain of losing a child is impossible to express to those who do not know. We think about Bear every single day - the baby he was, and the boy he would have been. 

Our pain and confusion was made worse after Bear’s birth, by being given no answers to what had happened. Why hadn’t his compromised placenta been picked up on a routine scan? How could such an avoidable loss have been allowed to happen. Bear weigh well over 7 pounds when he was born and could happily have been delivered before his placenta failed. So many tragic circumstances on so many different levels. 

Now to mark what should have been Bear's 10th birthday we are raising money to prevent other families from this earth shattering loss and trauma. 

We are, of course, raising the money for Teddy's Wish, our friends' Jen and Chris' amazing charity, set up after the loss of their son Eddie to SIDS. Teddy's Wish is in this instance, supporting the Tommy''s Placental Vessel study. 

Please donate what you can, in Bear's name, and know that you are helping to change the appalling statistics around stillbirth: 8 babies every day die, which equates to 1 in every 250 births. 

Donate and help save precious and much longed for lives. 

The Placenta Vessels study

In partnership with Tommy’s, this project is looking at the vessels of the placenta and has the potential to shed light on the causes of stillbirths and provide grieving families with the answers they so need and deserve.

Led by Professor Alexander Heazell, this project is focused on the placenta. When it does not function as it should, women suffer from ‘placental insufficiency’ - accounting for up to 50% of total cases of stillbirth. Placentas from babies that have suffered from fetal growth restriction (when the baby is too small for gestational age, which is a risk factor for stillbirth) have a less elaborate network of vessels than normally grown placentas. But not enough is known about why this happens – and that’s precisely what this research will seek to address, eventually enabling medical professionals to identify damaged vessels that are not functioning as they should.