Harriet Cochrane

1000 Decisions

Spending Time With Our Daughter

The next morning we woke up to Pip having been moved to the room next door to us, and again we could go in and out of there as much as we wanted.

The clinical photographer had been to take photos of Pip on her own, and would we like photos of us too? I wasn’t sure, Tim went through and I sat on the hospital bed on my own, then another wave of guilt, that feeling of overwhelming grief, and also that I was a bad mum because I couldn’t face having photos taken.

A few minutes passed and I decided to go through, seeing Tim holding our little girl was all too much, she should be alive, we shouldn’t be going into another room to see her, she should be snuggled on my chest. The photographer suggested we all put our hands in together for a photo, and I just couldn’t do it, my grief was too big. I left. 

Every time I walked away from her there was more guilt. My body had done this, and now I had to live with the consequences. Except I wasn’t facing them, I was walking away, retreating back to bed to hide, to try and pretend the ending was different. Our bereavement midwife came and sat with me, she offered me a couple of books to read, accounts from other families in similar positions to us. I took them and added it to the pile of leaflets and resources to read about baby loss and grief. I thought we would be heading home with leaflets on breastfeeding, on when our baby’s first check up would be, not decisions to make about her funeral.

We had a busy morning with meetings to fill out paper work and deciding on what we would like to do with Pip. What kind of post mortem we would like, where she would be transferred to for it, and what funeral arrangements would we make. I can’t really remember what was said, our consultant Rachel had on a lovely skirt which might seem like an odd thing to remember, but it was pleated and full of colour, and I wondered if she had worn it for what was supposed to be our rainbow baby, or whether it was pure coincidence.  I can remember Tim holding my hand, sitting on the edge of the massive chunky chairs that were in our room, but the details are hazy and the words won’t come to me now.

I remember being asked to sign some paper work, I think it was to release Pip from our hospital to Addenbrooks in Cambridge for her post mortem, but I’m not sure. All I can remember is crying so much that I couldn’t even see where to sign, let alone make a signature that at some point in the future would be recognisable as my own.

It felt completely wild to be signing her away, we’d not even been with her that long, and yet here we were being asked to send her off.

We were given the option of keeping Pip at the hospital over the weekend rather than her being whisked away from us on the Friday, and we agreed it was the best thing to do. I needed more time, if not with Pip, just to make sure we had made the right decisions.

Our mum’s arrived to see Pip, each one had time with her on their own. We were painfully aware that both our mums had been very excited about us finally getting pregnant, and now here we were inviting them to hold our dead baby. When I first mentioned it to my mum, she wasn’t sure at first, and I totally understood her feelings, we were the same, there are so many questions that fly around your head. What would she look like? Do I want memories of this? I told her Pip was super cute, that she had perfect little hands and long legs, and I would completely respect her decision either way on whether she wanted to see her or not.

I am so pleased both our mums took us up on the offer of meeting her, it made her seem more real, and gave them some memories of her too. I didn’t stay long to see them hold her, I was too ashamed that Pip had died in my care, and seeing their tears made me feel even worse about it all, so back to bed I went. Back to hide from the world. 

Tim’s mum had paid for this round of IVF, it took us a year to take her up on the offer, I knew that we could potentially be throwing this money away, what if it didn’t work. Would she be ok with spending that amount of money on something she may never see? Not once did I think it would work and then have a stillborn baby. Not once. 

It literally never crossed my mind. 

And after all that worry about spending it, then the high of a positive pregnancy test, here we were asking her to see our perfect Pip, cold and lifeless in a hospital room.

The crushing weight of grief is so tiring, especially straight after birth, Tim kindly offered to take our mums for a walk so I could rest, but in the end I just wanted to be with Pip, so the midwives carefully brought her back into our room in her cold cot.

I picked her up and cuddled her, I sat there wondering how many other mothers are doing the same thing in the hospital right now, only their babies were living.

We wrote letters to Pip before we left the hospital, I needed somewhere I could openly talk to her, let her know how sorry I was for not being able to keep her safe. The guilt and the shame of losing a baby is so all consuming at times. It doesn’t matter how many times the midwives, consultants and doctors tell me I did nothing wrong, my body couldn’t keep her safe. 

I was the only one looking after her, and she died with me. 

I’m not sure this feeling will ever change, even if we find a medical cause, I was the one growing her, I was the only one who could keep her safe, and she died. 

We spent the rest of the day with her in our room, after spending five days hiding from the world I needed to get out of there. I thought a trip to fill up my water bottle in the corridor would be good, I wouldn’t be going far, and it was a speedy retreat back to our room if I needed. That was a big mistake. Seeing other women with their babies, or hearing phone calls from happy parents telling families that their newborn had arrived was a lot to take in.

I felt we had been kept away from the other parents, in a good and kind way, by keeping beautiful living newborn babies cries away from us. But at the same time we were being kept away from new parents. No-one wants to be in our situation. It’s unthinkable. They wouldn’t want to see us, and we struggled seeing them. 

The call bells from other rooms were a constant noise, each time I wondered if it was because a baby was nearly here, or a new mum needing help with latching. Parents walking in and out with food deliveries, and going home with their babies. Our midwife had said that when mums decide they want to leave, they want to leave NOW. And she was right. Suddenly I didn’t want to be there any more, it didn’t feel like a safe haven, there were too many happy families beyond our door and it was getting harder to ignore them. So we gave her notice that we would be heading home that evening. 

Packing up our stuff was hard, but walking out of that room leaving our beautiful Pip behind was one of the most horrific things we’ve had to do. Tim took our bags out to the car first, so that we only had ourselves to walk out with.

I cannot describe the pain I felt in my chest as we were ushered out the back door, clutching her memory box so tight, I couldn’t see from the tears in my eyes.

We should have been filming ‘the hot dad walk’. We should have been walking out of the front door with our newborn daughter. We should have been walking out in the bright sunlight to our car with the baby seat. Instead we said one final goodbye to her through the window, and left.

With a midwife's words of advice still bouncing around my head, we stopped off at M&S to pick up a caterpillar cake, a cheese board and a bottle of Port. Just like we had said we would once our baby was born, and although she wasn’t coming home with us, we could still make those memories.

I sat in the car whilst Tim went in, I was still so sore from birth and the last thing I felt like doing was food shopping. Had this been a normal birth, I would have prepped this beforehand so we wouldn’t have to make a stop, but of course none of this was planned, so we were rolling on instinct instead. Another thing I had failed at, no baby, and no food.

I had thought we would get better sleep at home, in our own bed, with the silence that comes from living in a village. But I hadn’t thought about how loud my thoughts were going to be.

As soon as I laid my head down on the pillow I was taken straight back to the night we were last at home. When I was laying there trying to get her to move, that feeling of not being pregnant, making that phone call to the maternity triage, and then the world of pain we fell through when there was no heart beat.

Instantly I regretted leaving her at the hospital, we should be there. I wanted to hold her again and be with her. 

Tim wasn’t so sure about going back to see her, and I wasn’t sure if it was my hormones pulling me towards her or guilt or something else. We knew she would deteriorate every day, and would change really quickly, what would we find if we saw her again?

She would be in the cold store at the hospital i guessed, rather than in her moses basket. Would that change her appearance? We sat on it for 24 hours, I still felt the same.

I needed to go back and hold her, tell her how much I loved her and that we would remember her forever. 

I felt like we left her in chaos, not actual outside chaos, but my brain was chaos. The guilt and sadness had been strong at the hospital before we left, and I didn’t want that to be her final moments with us.

We’d left with me weeping over her moses basket, me saying how sorry I was that I couldn’t keep her safe, that my body had let us down, and she'd died. I couldn’t let that be my lasting memory with her. 

Sunday

So we went back, and it 100% the right decision. We were apprehensive about going back, what would she look like now?

We were ushered in the back door again, and thankfully back into the same room we had been in before. There was no time limit on how long we could stay with her, she was back in her cold cot with all her teddies, letters, flowers and blankets.

I just needed the time to hold her again, to feel the weight of her in my arms, resting on my now empty tummy. To stroke her hands and tell her how proud we are of her, how much we love her, and that we will never forget her.

It was a much calmer experience, and one where I felt the most like her mum. We had time to breathe and think, read her stories and soak up every inch of her. We took some more photos and just spent time as a family together. 

She had changed, quite a bit actually. But she was still perfect, our perfect Pip.

There was a moment when Tim was holding her that I had a moment of clarity, and said I wanted us to leave via the front door. We had done everything every other family had done on this ward. And we had done it through extreme grief.

We deserved to walk out of that ward with our heads held high, through the front door. 

I needed to do it, I was so proud of Pip. Of Tim too for getting us both through this crazy, unimaginable ordeal. 

We were parents too.

I’d given birth. 

We have a daughter.

She is called Pip. 

Luckily the ward was pretty quiet, the doors to the rooms open for the most part, I could see birth balls ready to use, the big birth pools that I'd dreamed of using sitting ready for its next mother to labour in. The empty cots awaiting new babies. 

And we walked out.

Not in shame, tears yes. Lots of tears, but our heads held high, hands clasped tightly together and we walked out into the sunshine. Tim and I as a team, we would get through this together.

Meeting Our Daughter

They had whisked her behind the curtain straight after birth, I felt we needed a little bit of time to get cleaned up, and properly back in the room before we met her.

I wanted to be with Tim, for us to re-connect before we embarked on meeting our child. It may sound odd to say that, and I feel guilty for not wanting to hold her straight away, but I think it was the right thing to do, for both of us. We didn’t know what to expect, and I didn’t want that first meeting to be crazy and chaotic. We were scared too.

That post birth high is unlike anything I will ever have again. I felt so incredibly proud of us. SO PROUD of what we had gotten through, as a team, together, Tim always by my side.

We did it. 

I could see in Tim’s eyes that we had been through two completely different experiences during the birth, and now straight after we were in very very different places. I was on a high, the tension and pain had left my body, I felt invincible and just so happy.

Tim on the other hand looked like he had just witnessed something truly horrific, he looked traumatised and so sad. I wanted to remind him that this post birth high was my hormones, and just general relief that we had got through it safely, that it was ok we were in different places right now. If I could have given him my happy hormones I would have done, I wished we were in the same place. But I couldn’t, and I don’t think any part of our grieving journey will be the same as each other.

We made a pact to keep talking to each other about how we were feeling, keep the communication open, be brave and have those hard conversations.

We had asked our midwife to give us an idea of what condition our baby was in, we knew babies deteriorate as time goes on in the womb after death, and it had been days since she died. Whilst kneeling beside me on the bed, she let slip that we had a daughter!

A daughter!! A little girl, our precious little girl. I looked at Tim and said “I thought we were having a girl”, I guess it’s mothers instinct. It was such a lovely way to find out her gender.

They brought her through to us, wrapped in a white towel and pale yellow blanket, she was so perfect, our perfect Pip. Her hands were so tiny, her little button nose, she was still warm. Those first few photos we have of me holding her say it all, a proper smile, the first one in a long time, and little did I know the last one in a very long time.

I was so proud of her, she’d done so well throughout the pregnancy, and she was perfect. She looked just like our scan photos, and had really long legs and big feet. We just sat and admired her, looked at her little face, and stroked her hands. I don’t remember our midwife leaving, we were absorbed in the details of our daughter. 

I handed her to Tim, and it broke my heart a little, him finally getting to hold the child we had longed for, for over 9 years, and here she was, dead.

He looks good as a Dad, she looked tiny in his arms. We were lucky and had packed a camera, not knowing at the time if we would take any photos or not, but these are now our very very treasured memories.

Hospital time is like no other, and I wish we had documented more of our time there through photos, but when you’re in the midst of it all, it was the last thing I thought about.

Tim said he thought he’d make a good girl dad, and I said he’d have made a great one. It’s easy to forget that everyone in our family had their own idea’s of what it would be like with our baby, and I hadn’t really thought, or asked Tim about the things he would like to do with her, what would his days look like given free reign?

I got my famous nhs tea and toast. And I can tell you it was better than I had imagined it would be! 

At some point we gave her back to the staff, they got the cold cot ready for her, and I had a shower.

I wasn’t too sure how I’d feel about the cold cot, but it turned out to be a moses basket, complete with white frilly cover, and lots of cosy towels and blankets tucked up in there with her. It looked far less scary than I had thought it would.

Your instinct when touching a baby is to keep them warm and cosy, and every time I touched her, the coldness of her skin shocked me, I knew she needed to be cold so we could spend more time with her, but your instinct is to wrap the blankets around her tightly, to warm her up, but now that would never be the case.

Somehow in the mad panic of telling Tim what to pack for our stay, I had thought to get him to bring her some outfits. We settled on the one we had planned for her to come home in, her “Hello World” little onesie. He had thought to pick up some of the large muslins too, and some little teddies we had bought for her, things which later on would go with her on her final journey.

Hours were spent looking at her and holding her. A midwife came in and started to clear up from the birth, I hadn’t clocked my placenta sitting quietly in a bowl on the side trolly. She remembered that I had wanted to see it, and carefully showed us it’s various parts. I had wanted to see it from an inquisitive point of view, I’d made this whole new organ, one that I had birthed, and I wanted to be nosy and see what it looked like, knowing I’d never make another one, or get the chance to see it again.

When the staff had left, and Tim was out getting dinner for us, it was unbelievably quiet. Pip was in her moses basket by my side, and I was just staring at her. It was Wednesday evening and I hadn’t slept properly (and I say properly in the loosest sense of the word, because who sleeps well in the summer at seven months pregnant?!) since Friday night, leaning back on the bed I closed my eyes briefly.

It was so quiet, then the moses basket made a creak, my eyes popped open and I stared at Pip, did she move? Had they got it wrong, was my baby waking up? Could the love that we had shown her brought her back to life?

I know it sounds crazy, and maybe it is, but in those few seconds I really hoped they were wrong, that she was sleeping and not dead.

It turns out the cold pad on the bottom of her basket makes the wicker creak when it’s cooling down, it wasn’t my baby waking up, a miracle, it was just hot and cold working their magic on the basket.

After the trauma of the moses basket creaking earlier in the evening, we decided to take the midwives up on the offer of having Pip sleep in another room to us for the night, I still feel guilty about this, and have to remind myself that we made the best decisions we could, at the time, with how we were feeling. I was so tired, we desperately needed some good sleep, we knew we would have lots of decisions to make the next day about her autopsy and funeral.

The midwives used a small office space for her, they had set up a little nightlight, and put a blind up at the window. They said we could visit her whenever we liked in the night, and they would keep an eye on her for us. It was like a little nursery space, so cute and really thoughtful. She went in there with all her teddies, and blankets.

It feels really hard to take care of yourself in this situation, you’ve just given birth, are trying to create memories that will have to last a lifetime, and then throw in grief and mum guilt, it’s a complicated cocktail of emotions. I don’t know what other people do that first night, are they there snuggling their newborn baby, or do they need the rest like we did?

There are so many options of what to do at each point in hospital, which is a good thing, but it can also be overwhelming, and we just had to trust our instincts and go with what we thought was best at the time. Looking back I think 98% of the decisions we made were right, but with time and hindsight (and sleep) there are a couple of things I feel we could have made different/better choices with, and if I could do it again, maybe I’d have her in with us.

Labour

I sobbed when the first real contractions came, not because they hurt, but it meant the beginning of the end. I felt so out of my depth. I’d done so much research on birth and labouring, and not once did I research Stillbirth. 

I felt, and still feel, stupid. 

How stupid of me to think this baby would come home with us. How stupid to have been buying baby clothes and excitedly planning the nursery. How stupid of me to not have researched what I now needed to know. 

We were afloat in this devastating fog, from my pain relief options, to the cold cot, I knew nothing. The midwives had to write things out for us as we weren’t able to hold information in our brains, grief has such a huge impact on our minds and bodies, and we were just at the start of seeing that. It was becoming obvious that this impossible task was more impossible than I thought. 

Hospital time is completely different to normal time, you need to do obs at 2am, yeah of course. 4am blood tests, yeah go for it.

Then suddenly it was morning, and the realisation that we had to tell our mums this devastating news. There’s no hiding that a 6.30am phone call on a Sunday morning can be anything other than something bad.

The second I heard my mums voice I could barely speak, our mums were so excited for this baby too. They knew our 9 year struggle, all of the early and ivf losses, they’ve been through it with us, and we knew they’d be as heartbroken as we are.

Tears rolled off my cheeks onto the hospital bedding. What do I say? How can I say that we’ve lost our beautiful baby, and now I have to go through childbirth.

The anxiety around the birth and what was to come after, that would come later on. For now it was grief. 

Phone calls to slightly wider family followed. We needed them, not just as a shoulder to cry on, but to help us prepare physically for the birth. We had rocked up at the maternity triage with just my maternity notes and a bottle of water, and now we might be here for days, we needed some bits from home.

They did good, bringing the bare essentials as well as the ‘nice to haves’. Some clean pyjamas, a hair brush to make me feel human, and some wonderful extras like moisturiser and lavender pillow spray. 

Our lovely midwife suggested we spend some time outside in the sunshine, it was a heat wave after all, and here we were plunged into darkness in our hospital room. We picked lavender and rosemary from the little garden.

I retreated to the hot bath after a while, needing the intimacy and comfort of a small space, somewhere I couldn’t be poked or prodded. Something that felt familiar and cocoon like, our lovely midwife had found a light projector, and family had bought over some nightlights, it was just what I needed for a bit. 

It was in the bath that I could really be in awe of my body for a little bit, on the whole I hated it, it had betrayed me. But in the few minutes of calm in the water, I could admire the way my body was having contractions, my tummy getting hard and pointy, then being able to watch it ease off before coming again. I held the sides of my tummy and wished the ending would be different, I tried to think of how much more magical this would be if we were birthing a live baby, the excitement rather than dread that it would be bringing.

I thought of all the other mothers who had laboured in this tub. Did their babies make it? Or were they like us, expecting silence after the birth?

The contractions ramped up, it was painful and getting more intense, waves of grief floored me and made it almost impossible to labour without sobbing, only a few days in and already I was mentally exhausted, little did I know what the next few months would feel like.

It was Wednesday morning, we had rocked up at the hospital Saturday night, and the labour felt long and exhausting. Our lovely midwife could see me fighting against my body, fighting against the contractions. 

Subconsciously I was fighting to keep hold of our baby. How can I let her go? It’s taken 9 years to get to this point. 

I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t let go. I tried. Mind over matter, but my mind was fighting against my body, making the labour longer and more stressful for everyone involved. If I could have switched my mind off for a few hours I would have done.

One of the consultants came in, and said we needed to progress further with the labour, I got this feeling they didn’t think I was doing too well, that maybe I’d never be able to let go of our baby.

More hours passed, the pain was intense and I just didn't have the energy to keep going. I asked for an epidural, little did I know that I wouldn’t get it, but the comfort thinking it was on it’s way helped a little.

The new epidural bed came into the room, and I had to switch from my bed to this new one. It was cramped in there with staff and beds. Tim was told to go out and get some fresh air.

Tim’s bed went out, the new bed came in, and our midwife rolled the birth ball over to me, popped a puppy pad on top and asked me to get onto it. I was dizzy, felt sick and asked to lay on the floor, she said no, in a firm but kind way, and helped me off the bed.

I tried to balance on the ball, and as I let my weight down on the ball it popped my waters. 

It was like when you wash the back of a spoon, it sprayed everywhere. I had screamed when it happened, not from pain, but from shock. Our midwife, who had been clearing the bed sheets off of my bed, immediately un-scrunched them and said “get on the bed, get on the bed, get on the bed” over and over until I was back up there.

The instinct to push was unbelievable. There was no stopping it.

I could hear our midwife saying to Tim and a new midwife who had rushed back after seeing the call bell light up for our room, “we’re having a baby, we didn’t think we were, but we’re having a baby” and trying to direct Tim to walk around the mess I’d made on the floor when my waters broke.

He appeared by my side mid push. It’s pushing like I’ve never felt before. I suddenly felt super excited to meet our lovely baby.

Those 6 minutes of pushing felt like 20 seconds, and before I knew it I could feel her moving round in the birth canal and being born.

That relief after she was born was instant, like someone had flicked a switch and suddenly I could see and hear again properly.

I looked to my side, there was my lovely Tim, “hello” I said, I felt like i’d been on another planet for days, and here we were re-connecting again.

I didn’t notice the injection to help the placenta out, on all fours, gas and air still in hand, I just stared at the bedding, the mess I’d made, all the gore of birth around my knees. Tim saying “you don’t have to look at that”, it wasn’t that I wanted to, I was just so physically tired my head had slumped down. I could feel the midwives doing what they were doing behind me, then Jen telling me to take one big gulp of gas and air before one last push to birth the placenta out.

Finally, it was done. Three and a half days since I first took the medication, I had done it.

Finding Out We Had Lost Our Baby

Lying down in our bed, that panicked feeling creeping in that she’d gone, I didn’t feel pregnant. And then the full moon and a sky full of stars told me it was over before we even got to the hospital. I always said our baby would be born on a full moon, I never thought she would die under one.

There was silence from the midwife when she couldn’t find her heartbeat. “Babies can still hide from us, even at this gestation”, kind words meant to calm and reassure us.

We held on to the tiniest crack of hope, maybe she's right. Our baby is just hiding. 

Then more people came in, the portable ultrasound machine, more people. Their silence rang through my ears, and finally, ‘I’m sorry”.

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