I’ve since read lots of stories where loss parents note that the silence after their baby was born was deafening. At the time though, I didn’t really notice, I just felt relief. Relief that the physical pain was over (how quickly it disappears!) and the labour process was done. The first thing my husband said was how much Henry looked like our daughter. After my husband had cut the cord (he had wanted to do this as he had done so for our daughter) Henry was passed to him and I had my first glimpse of my son. I stroked his face and hand with my fingers and then my husband passed him over to me for our first cuddle.
At some point our wonderful midwife Sue produced a camera and asked us if we wanted her to take some pictures. I’m so glad we said yes - although we have more photos taken by us and the bereavement midwives later that day, those ones in the delivery room are some of my favourites, and the only ones that have the three of us in them. It’s also a reminder of that time immediately after Henry’s birth, as looking back it is all a bit of a haze.
As well as the photos, Sue was going through the usual post-birth processes, including giving me an injection to speed up the delivery of the placenta. This had worked straight away with my daughter, but no such luck this time. We tried a number of things to encourage it to come away but I instinctively knew that it wasn’t going to without intervention (which is apparently more common in stillbirth). So it was explained I would need to go to theatre to have it manually removed.
Despite my obsessive reading about many pregnancy and birth complications in both my pregnancies, this wasn’t something I really knew much about and my mind went into overdrive in a burst of misplaced anxiety and stress. This wasn’t helped by the consent form for the procedure, the only word of which that sunk in was “hysterectomy”, under the section for unlikely yet possible risks. Up until now in life I had always taken comfort in statistics, i.e. if something was a 1 in 1000 chance then I rationalised it was very unlikely to happen to me as a way of calming the anxiety. Now, having become the 1 in 250 whose pregnancy ends in stillbirth, I just couldn’t do that anymore. Why wouldn’t I be the one in however many for whom this went wrong? I started to panic about losing my womb, or worse my life, as a result of this routine procedure. This wasn’t helped by a delay of a few hours in the procedure, due to the morning shift change and a backlog of patients needing to be taken to theatre - those whose babies were still alive and needed to be delivered as soon as possible.
During this time, Henry had been placed into a cold cot by the side of my bed, after weighing in at 4lbs 7oz. After a while the incoming midwife suggested that I hold him again or we took some handprints but I just couldn’t handle it at that moment. I just wanted the placenta sorted and to be moved from the delivery room to the bereavement suite. The midwives also brought in a choice of memory boxes and talked us through what was in them - it just seemed such a bizarre thing to be choosing and focusing on in that moment, although now the box we did select means the world to me.
As shift change approached at 8am, it was time for Sue to say goodbye to us. It didn’t feel like we had only known her for twelve hours. After wishing us all the best and commenting that we were clearly “a strong couple” (whatever that means) she came over and asked if she could give me a hug. I accepted. Due to covid, hugs outside our household had been in short supply over the preceding months and unnecessary contact was still discouraged. I can’t even explain how much it meant to me to have that hug, having not seen my own family or friends since we had been told that Henry had died.