Beccy Allen

Half way!

I realise I’ve not made this particularly trackable, despite making a Strava account when I signed up. Unfortunately, my Apple Watch is broken and my Fitbit has gone walkabout. Neither of my map apps are particularly useful when I’m doing 90% of my runs in the gym. Annoyingly, the treadmills and cross trainers don’t have accurate distance trackers either. But I am, I promise, just over half way with about 22k left to go.

Where my joints and nerves are damaged, I often have to alternate between treadmill and cross trainer so that I can finish each 5k. On a couple of occasions I’ve had to split them in to two 2.5k runs. It’s an odd sensation, feeling so much pain and tiredness where I’d previously have felt a bit sweaty and out of puff but relatively comfortable. The whole point is, if i found it easy, why bother?

Since the day of George’s birth, and at each thought of Henry’s, I remind myself that pain after those events are nothing in comparison. I don’t need to remind myself that nothing will ever be more painful than holding my beautiful little George and knowing I’ll never get look into his eyes, never hear him laugh, never see his hand and footprints grow and plant themselves all around our house. In much the same way, I remember the emotional agony of not being conscious for Henry’s birth; the fear, the failure. Not knowing if he was even alive when I woke up. He cried and I wasn’t there to comfort him. I don’t even know what his first cry sounded like. Others held him, fed him, put him in his first nappy and changed him to the next one before I was even awake. 

The physical agony that followed was shocking to me. I’ve had surgery before and have never felt anything like the pain of an emergency section performed in 6 minutes, start to birth. It made finally getting to care for my baby heartbreaking. I so wanted to do everything and still couldn’t even feel my feet. My back and shoulders were sore and feeling strange from the shock and medication. My legs were so swollen the skin was splitting on one foot.

The night after Henry was born, I had two doctors and a midwife in my room running tests to make sure I wasn’t having a heart attack from the pain in my chest, back and right arm. A gift of trapped air left in my abdominal cavity when they closed me up. Five days after he was born, I was tested for sepsis. It wasn’t sepsis, it was exhaustion, but carried all the same symptoms. I was so unwell from the stress, no time to heal before jumping into NICU action, and sleep severe deprivation (pumping milk every 2 hours and hobbling to NICU to deliver it at 1am, 3am, 5am, then to sit with him from 7am), it was relentless. My hospital bed was broken and made getting up horrendously painful (and dangerous as I wasn’t supposed to be pulling myself up, but needs must). 

Tom didn’t even get a bed, he spent five nights on folded towels on the floor before I discharged myself so I could spent more time in NICU. My NHS meals consisted of, for example, two chicken nuggets, six pieces of potato wedges and one floret of broccoli. I had to sustain both me and Henry on it. 

Two weeks after Henry was born, I weighed 8kg less than before I even got pregnant. I watched them feed him my milk through a tube 12 times a day and cried because it should have been me feeding him. I tried to comfort him and tell him his mummy and daddy were there, but there was plexiglass in the way. People congratulated us, but I couldn’t even fathom feeling lucky or celebrated. It felt isolating and fraught. My hair fell out three months postpartum and every single one has grown back grey.

So really, pain and fatigue (because the iron deficiency has never been resolved…) are nothing in comparison. When I feel like giving up because it hurts a lot and I’m tired, I think about what would have happened if I gave up on life the way I wanted to after George. I think about my tiny little baby in his incubator who needed me to get up and got to him, even though moving felt like being severed in half from the inside out. I think about the 42 days of enormous blood thinning injections and I think about the promise I made to George that no other mummies and daddies should have to feel as alone as we did when we lost him. I promised I would keep going. So, here I got for my next run in 29° heat. For you, boys.