When the System Failed Us: My Son’s Stillbirth at 39 Weeks
I didn’t think when I first started trying to get pregnant in 2018 that it would take so much effort. I had an understanding from the excruciating awkward occasional sex ed lessons at school that conception was as simple as a male and a female get it on and after some time a baby will pop out, such false advertising!
But when I decided I wanted to start trying for a family months turned into years and there was still no baby. I finally plucked up the courage to ask my GP, knowing that it was probably my Polycystic ovaries hampering our efforts and they quickly had me in for blood tests that started us on the path for fertility support. Thanks to Covid my husband had to hand over his part of the testing to a lab tech in a car park nearly an hour’s drive away. We still laugh about whether that was one of the weirdest things we’ll ever experience, they said to keep the specimen at body temp so he drove along a near empty motorway whilst I smuggled a specimen sample pot in my cleavage. We then handed over the sample to someone so cloaked in PPE in the car park outside we weren’t even sure they were a member of staff. They obviously were though, and we received the results that everything was on track for us to start discussing our options with the fertility team when they got in touch. We joked that there wasn’t much to do during lock down and when Christmas was cancelled for us due to the pandemic, we managed to finally make a baby all on our own.
We had faced our adversity and overcome our issues… we thought.
We tearfully told our families and select friends before even the first scan because we were just so excited it had finally happened to us; we had faced our adversity and overcome our issues… we thought. I could hear the relief in my best friend’s voice who had told me just the week before that she was expecting, getting pregnant as soon as she had looked at her new husband.
Fast forward 9 months and I am sat waiting for an appointment by myself whilst my other half Tom waits outside because…. still Covid… and then we finally get called in. We were there to discuss early induction, because he was measuring big and I was anxious to get him out. I’d been having nightmares, like I knew that it needed to be sooner. I hadn’t had a particularly difficult pregnancy apart from a bleed at 10 weeks that they described as a threatened miscarriage, and after a check over and a scan we were reassured, everything was ok, it was “just one of those things”, but perhaps I shouldn’t do any high impact exercise for the remainder of my pregnancy. Oh, and also being called and given the wrong results after our 12-week scan. We had an increased chance of our baby having trisomy 21 so we technically broke covid rules leaving the city to have an unnecessary NIPT test at the private clinic that could see us soonest. It wasn’t cheap either but I said that’s what my annual bonus bought us, information about our baby. When I called to tell them, we’d had the test the woman on the phone was very confused as to why, checking my details again and then going silent. I asked what my results were and she read off completely different figures than the ones I had received the week before. “So was I given the wrong person’s results” I surmised. She stayed silent, I don’t know if she was scared or loyal, but eventually I made her confirm which results were correct. Our baby didn’t have any additional chance for anything the 12-week scan checks for. A fact that was solidified by the results of the NIPT test a few weeks after and the news he was a he!
My last words to her, after she insisted, I go to 39 weeks were, “is there nothing I can say to make you change your mind”
Nearly 6 months after that, and nearing the last hurdle, I waddled into the windowless room to be confronted by the consultant or registrar. Who explained she was a locum, but made no small talk whilst bad-temperedly clicking through computer screens then left the room then came back complaining about the system… the other staff… the everything! She couldn’t access the right records so she then made decisions about him coming into the world based on limited information, a decision based only on what we could tell her of the growth scan appointment that we remembered, from weeks before, as first-time parents, with no medical backgrounds. My last words to her, after she insisted, I go to 39 weeks were, “is there nothing I can say to make you change your mind”. “No, no” she shook her head gesturing for us to leave the room. I don’t think she ever made eye contact with me, the whole appointment. A few weeks later on the day she scheduled me to be induced Holden Cosmo Moore was pronounced dead. “I’m sorry, there’s no heart beat”.
Her round belly bulging with life whilst my cold swollen stomach had become a tomb for my son.
I called my best friend later that day, in a blur, just wanting to hear her voice saying all the right things to comfort me, we were closer than sisters, but as I told her I could hear the panic and self-conscious tone creep in as she internalised the worry, being pregnant herself, due 2 weeks after me. She was so strong for me, and put all of that fear aside to come to my house the following day, just before I went back to the hospital for him to be born. Her round belly bulging with life whilst my cold swollen stomach had become a tomb for my son. I said goodbye knowing I wouldn’t be able to meet up with her again for some time, maybe ever.
I can talk of hope and the future and all of the things that came after, but even several years on, a part of my soul is trapped in that room with the consultant forever, still screaming and begging the universe to change. We found out at the medical review that he was “genetically, internally and externally perfect.” My son was perfect in every way, and yet he died and I have to live the rest of my life without him, furious at a flawed person and a broken system.
