On March 11th 2020 I was 27+6 weeks pregnant with our first baby. I had an appointment for my 28 week check up, I had concerns about my baby’s movement but was told with an anterior placenta this could be why. They said everything was fine. I explained that I hadn’t really felt my baby kick properly and I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be feeling. I was then put on a CTG machine and was told I would need to go to another hospital as the consultants were going home. I was reassured everything would be ok and I would be going home soon, It was just a precaution. I rang my partner Dan and asked him to pack me an overnight bag and to meet me at the hospital, there was no rush as everything was ok.

Life changed forever for us as a family on 1^st August 2017. The day previously, we had innocently kissed goodbye to our children, Zachary then six, and Sienna four, who were both equally excited about the pending arrival of their baby sister.

We arrived at the hospital for my planned induction and by the afternoon my contractions were beginning; not the most glamourous way for my husband Drew and I to celebrate our Wedding Anniversary but our focus was on the safe arrival of our much longed for third child. My mum was also with us for extra emotional support, like she had been when I gave birth to Sienna. To encourage the progression of my labour Mum and I climbed the numerous stairs within the hospital and paced the corridors. Naively, we laughed as we passed one room with the plaque ‘HB Suite’ joking that some women were privileged to give birth in such luxury. We were blissfully unaware that the walls within this room held such sadness and hearts were forever broken.

As a young girl I’d been a huge fan of the show ‘Sister, Sister’, deciding that when I had children of my own, I’d definitely have twins. Fast forward many years, including a diagnosis of PCOS in my early twenties, and I’m lying on a bed in the EPU with my husband of 18 months, Tom, being told we’re expecting twins – high five to me for manifesting that childhood goal! But it wasn’t meant to be… I was 9 weeks along and there due to a peachy coloured discharge I came to know all too well. I was told to rest and signed off work.

The first time I held Alice, she was dying.  At five days old, at some ungodly hour of the night in NICU, she was gently placed into my arms, where she belonged all along. “Oh she feels LOVELY” were the only words I could find, and I repeated them over and over, insisting that the nurses transfer her to her Dad quickly so that he could feel this too, while she was still alive, the warm little bundle we’d worried about so intensely and loved so fiercely for the past seven months.