My message

On 26th December 2016 we lost our first daughter Lentil. She was born still at 40 weeks and 5 days, after what looked like a normal healthy pregnancy. Her sudden, unexplained death devastated me and my husband and had a profound long-lasting impact on our family, friends and work relationships.

Since the hospital days, Sands, the stillbirth and neonatal
death charity, has been our lifeline. Sands operates across the UK: supporting anyone affected by the death of a baby, working in partnership with health professionals to ensure that bereaved parents and families receive the best possible care and promoting improvements in practice and funding research that could help to reduce the loss of babies’ lives.

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The story

* How we find out that our precious baby had died

Contractions started on the night of Christmas eve and continued through Christmas day. We were in constant contact with the Labour ward and Triage at Croydon University Hospital (South London) who advised to wait until waters broke (they never did) or to come in when contractions reached 2-3 minutes. When contractions were about 3 minutes apart, exhausted by the active labour pains and worried for decreased fetal movements, my husband drove us to the hospital just after midnight. We were admitted at Triage and I was asked to position myself on exactly the same bed where I lied down only four days earlier - at my last routine appointment that day I had expressed my concerns about the baby's irregular movements to one of the midwives, who suggested us to go to Triage to monitor the baby's heart more closely. Everything seemed absolutely fine then and we were dismissed.

That midnight after Christmas, instead, the midwife could not find the baby's heartbeat. She tried and tried, and we knew at that point that something was wrong. She called another colleague, who also was not able to find the baby's heartbeat. Then she called a sonographer, who showed us the baby on the screen and said: "There's no heartbeat. I'm sorry, but the baby has died". As our world crashed around us we were moved to the labour ward. It was also too late for an epidural or other strong pain relief.

Lentil was born sleeping, after a night of immense physical and emotional pain, the morning of 26 December 2016 at 5.55am. The room was filled with her silence and her peaceful beauty.

* What happened to us immediately after:

Later in the morning we were moved to a bereavement suite within the hospital, away from crying newborn babies, where we could spend the next 5 days with our beautiful baby girl in a cold cot next to us.
The bereavement suite and the cold cot (introduced in hospitals
only about five years ago, and unfortunately not every hospital is
equipped with them) allowed us to spend the most precious time with our daughter in a safe and protected environment and to create special
memories which we will cherish forever. These extra days we had with her mean everything to us.

The hospital put us in touch with Sands who offered us tremendous support. We discovered we were not alone in this earth-shattering grief and that more than 100 babies die every week in the UK. At Croydon hospital we received exceptional bereavement support to help us in our time of need. The booklet resources helped us and our families try to get our heads round the devastating news and the path we would then need to follow: arranging post mortem, funeral, cremation/burial etc.; information about parental leave, return to work, etc.; reading materials for family, friends and colleagues etc. 

We decided to choose an external autopsy only, the results of which we discussed after 6 weeks at our counsultant's appointment: the results of the examination of the placenta and Lentil's dna were inconclusive - no definite cause was found for her death. The hypothesis (discussed later on with a specialist in Bristol) is gradual placenta degeneration, or placental insufficiency (which wasn't picked up at our third scan in October, but it may have developed later) which caused her heart to stop beating during the final stages of pregnancy. The consultant concluded that her death could have been prevented by inducing labour after 37 weeks.

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