Autumn is my favourite season and I will always remember that he was meant to be an autumn baby.  He arrived, however, far too early but for me autumn will always belong to him.  After the loss of our son, Wolfhart, I sought solace in the baby loss community and it helped me through the darkest of days, but I couldn’t find a journey like ours.  I want to share his story, because he was here, he was beautiful, and to help another family feel less lonely.

I still find it so hard to grasp that most people can just have sex and 40 weeks later walk out with a healthy baby. That feels just like a fairy-tale now. As you can tell, this isn’t that sort of story but at least it isn’t boring (sorry dark baby loss humour alert).  Like so many, the start isn’t so interesting – petite girl meets tall boy; they fall in love and do the things that couples do… travel, move in together, get a hamster (standard), get engaged and eventually married. And after all that is done, start to think about making a tiny human.

Prior to May 2018 I knew very little about congenital heart conditions, and had never heard of the condition Transposition of the Great Arteries (TGA), a condition in which the two main blood vessels leaving the heart are switched over. Then all that changed as I sat and listened to a cardiologist tell my husband and I that our unborn daughter had TGA and would require open heart surgery within a few days of her birth. We were told that the surgery would happen in a children’s hospital in Dublin (over 100 miles from where we live) and in order to be as close as possible to that hospital I would also have to give birth in a hospital in Dublin.