Timeline continued - August 2008 - The pregnancy.....

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August 2008 - We get the 12 weeks scan and everything is fine. We’re sure we’re having a boy and we christen the foetus “Milo” and over the course of the next 4 months decide that if we have a boy that will be his name.

October 2008 - We get the 20 week scan and again everything is great, Milo really looks like me in the scan which is really bizarre.

November 2008 - Friday morning and Fiona wakes having had a really sever bleed, we’re in shock and fearful for the baby, Fiona is 25 weeks pregnant at this stage. We go to our local hospital in Montrose who advise us to go straight to Ninewells, a major hospital in Dundee. When there everything with the baby is checked out fine. Fiona is kept in for a couple of nights and her observations are good, the baby is really strong but we inject Fiona with steroids to aid the advancement of the baby’s lungs, in case it has to be delivered early.

December 2008 - We spend our first ever Christmas alone together, we’ve been together 7 years and have always went to one or the others parents. We decide that with Milo coming early next year we’ll have our first and last Christmas with just the two of us, we have a great time in our cosy house with the fire raging.
January 2009 - We bring in the New Year in Montrose, we go out for dinner and are back home for the bells, another nice evening out but Fiona is quite uncomfortable and quite big now.

February 2009 - The morning of Friday the 6th, Fiona has another huge bleed, this one looks even worse and again we rush to our local hospital. Things don’t look good and an ambulance is called to take Fiona down to Ninewells. Unbelievably they can’t get the doors closed in the ambulance and it’s like something from “Carry On” when it drives away, doors tied together with a piece of rope and Fiona holding on to the walls of the ambulance for dear life.

When we get to Ninewells Milo, who’s now 35 weeks today, observations are perfect yet again and the bleeding has stopped. Fiona is monitored all day and everything is perfect so we speak to a doctor about going home. She suggests it would be better to stay in over night and I go home to get some things for Fiona.

When I return Fiona says that I better sit down. The consultant obstetrician has been in, bizarrely had a good squeeze of her tummy and suggested that the baby feels like a good size so let’s get it out….. Fiona is scheduled in for an induced labour the following day…… yet again, mental bis-quits, where the funk did that come from?

Anyway, the next morning comes and I’m at the hospital bright and early for the start of the process, we’re told it will take 24+ for labour to start so the baby will no doubt be born on Sunday 8th of February. However there’s a twist. One of the reason’s Fiona is booked in to be induced is because the maternity ward is uncharacteristically quiet, spookily so. When we were rushed in at 25 weeks there were 21 babies born in a 24 hour period, a high count as the average is about 16. However today, there are only 2 babies due to be born so there’s loads of expertise on hand if Fiona needs help, but like I said, there’s a twist….

We’ve psyched ourselves up for becoming parents 5 weeks ahead of schedule when another obstetrician comes in, the one who had felt Fiona’s tummy is no off call for a few days and this new one, a young lady, suggests that she wouldn’t have made that call to induce Fiona, that she personally would like to ideally get to 37 weeks gestation, at least 36 weeks. Fiona is currently 35 weeks +3 days. We’re totally confused and left feeling like it’s our call, the obstetrician basically says that neither of them is right or wrong as we’re on the cusp, if Fiona had been 35 weeks they would have defiantly waited, if she had been 36 weeks they would have defiantly induced her but she’s slap bang in the middle. It’s a tightrope I tells ya.

We meet a paediatrician later that day who talks us through potential complications with delivering the baby now, after speaking to him we decide that the longer we can keep Milo in the better, we decide to wait it out with Fiona staying in the hospital, we have a scan scheduled for the day after tomorrow (Monday the 9th).

Unbelievably we wouldn’t have got induced that day anyway as an emergency labour had been brought in, just to set our head spinning even more I find out that the emergency is our friend Yvonne. Yvonne sits literally facing me at work and is due the week after us, March the 20th. She’s had 3 bad bleeds now and is induced straight away. She has a beautiful baby girl, Katie, on Saturday evening and all is well although Katie needs some help at SCABU for the first week.

So, back to us, Sunday passes without any issues and the baby is monitored every hour and all is good in the hood, we’re well rested and I go back to my work on Monday. I’m staying at my parents’ house which is 10 minutes from the hospital so I’m getting in as often as I want.

Fiona gets her scan on Monday morning and there’s an issue, a small pool of blood, it may be a sign that the placenta is breaking away and the obstetrician doesn’t want to take any chances, Fiona is taken down to the labour suite to be induced straight away, again they tell us this will take 24 hours to come to anything.

I concentrate on getting things sorted at work as I’m taking 3 weeks off after the birth which is now scheduled for tomorrow, at 15:30 Fiona texts to say she’s in a lot of pain so I leave work and head up to the hospital. She’s in good spirits and wants to go for a walk; we go for a wee stroll around the ground floor of labour suite and then go back to her bed. She’s being checked over regularly and the baby is monitored every 20 minutes, the heard beat is perfect so we’re getting excited.

Just before 6pm all hell breaks lose, Fiona has an almighty bleed and starts suffering major contractions, she’s in agony and the bleeding is very worrying, lead midwifes and consultant obstetricians are called, the decide that the baby has to come out and now. Fiona is taken into theatre for an emergency caesarean. I head off with the consultants to get scrubbed up, and the anaesthetist talks me through the process from the epidural to the delivery, I’m ready for it and when I walk into theatre in my green overalls Fiona gets the fright of her life thinking I’m away to operate on her…

Things take another turn for the worse when Fiona’s blood pressure drops dramatically, I’m ushered out of the room as they tell me they have to put her under a general anaesthetic, which isn’t without it’s risks, the next ten minutes are a bit of a blur, I’m sitting outside the theatre and can hear everything going on, it’s not nice the next thing is that I’m taken out of the labour suite and back onto the ward and told to get changed back into my clothes. I go back to Fiona’s bed and just sit and wait, there are two babies with their mothers on the ward so I draw the curtains around myself and gather my thoughts.

It’s a strange ten minutes or so that I sit there, I’m not sure what to do, I’m anxious and obviously worried and then I start thinking about the absolute uselessness of worrying, and how it can’t change anything, it’s all very bizarre but I have this moment of clarity, that’s what ever happens will be and I or we will have to live with that. At that point I didn’t know what to expect, was I away to become a Dad? A widower? Both? I pictured myself as Richard E Grant in that film the name of which I couldn’t remember then and still can’t now but it was all very surreal.

I also started to think about god, I had been brought up a Catholic and my family are still very religious, I took it on through my adolescence even when I moved out of home I continued to go to mass and enjoyed. I started to question my beliefs during our trip away and Fiona, having never been christened, was more a believer of religion as a way of teaching good morals as opposed to being a factually correct concept. Anyway, I started getting more in to Darwin and the theory of evolution and on that day, at 18:20 I had a quandary. Part of me was saying, if you do exist God, show me be saving my wife and child and the other part of me was thinking, well only the strongest will survive so if Fiona and Milo are meant to live then they well. Like I said, mental biscuits.

At 18:22 I heard a baby cry and knew it was my child as there was no-one else in labour. I was called through to the weighing room at 18:24 and for the first time I met my DAUGHTER, I couldn’t believe it, I actually asked the paediatrician (embarrassingly now) if he was sure it was a girl? He pulled up her legs and showed me “I’m pretty sure yeah”. He asked me if we had a name and I called her “Lois”, this was Fiona’s choice and I still didn’t know how she was doing and the midwives were quite vague about her status. Lois was perfect; she didn’t need any help whatsoever and was a very healthy 5lbs 11.5 oz’s.

I was told to go back to the ward and they would clean up Lois and bring her out. At 18:28 I was given my daughter and I felt so overwhelmed that I felt light-headed, it was amazing, she was just lying in my arms, so tiny, staring back at me with her eyes wide open, not a sound did she make. She had some head of hair on her and in truth I was a bit freaked out by how much she looked like me. All the midwives came over and had a look at her, the two other mothers who were on the ward had now been moved up to the visiting ward so I was all alone, with my baby, in a ward with nearly 30 beds. I still couldn’t get in to see Fiona and they kept telling me she would be out in “half an hour”, she was “just coming around”.

At 8pm I was really concerned, why hadn’t they let me see her? I finally put Lois into her crib and went towards the recovery room where Fiona was, the anaesthetist, a different one from the operation, was standing guard and was very blasé about her condition and recovery. I instantly didn’t like him, probably because he looked about 14 and seemed to have that small man syndrome that really aggravates me, anyway I kinda just pushed past him to where I heard Fiona moaning, she was lying on a bed with tubes coming out of everywhere, she was frantically pressing the button which I later found out was a morphine drip. I spoke to her and although she couldn’t really comprehend what I was telling her she didn’t believe that she had a baby, and also that it was a girl.

Her appearance shocked me, I knew she had just undergone major surgery and wouldn’t be anything near decent but she was so grey it was frightening, I later found out she had lost 2.5 litres of blood and was very close to getting a transfusion, the fact that she was young and fit helped her. She was on an iron drip and I was promised she would be out soon; I reluctantly left her and went back to Lois who was being cared for by about a dozen midwifes who were fighting over holding her.

Fiona appeared about 20:30 and met her daughter for the first time, she was pretty high off the morphine and I put Lois on her chest, Fiona took it all in her stride and introduced herself to her baby, it was hilarious, because Fiona was so floppy from the drugs she kept kissing Lois but would cover pretty much her whole face with her lips, I removed our daughter for fear of suffocation and Fiona drifted in and out of sleep for the next few hours. I phoned the grandparents to pass on the news then just sat and watched our baby breathing.

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