This is our second year experiencing it as our first year was shortly after we lost our daughter Thea. Thea was born at 25 weeks and 2 days after Jess had gone into preterm labour on February 25th 2023. Thea’s pregnancy was fairly typical apart from Jess being admitted to hospital for hyperemesis gravidarum.
Thea lived for 12 hours 12 minutes. Those hours were so important for us and unfortunately difficult decisions had to be made, as it had been made clear she was not going to be coming home with us. Whilst we felt the disappointment and overwhelming grief of the situation, we did everything we could with the help of the team in the Ulster to try and create some positive memories with our first born.
We found some comfort in small things like when one of the nurses said “Thea’s just done her first shift” as the nurses in the Ulster hospital usually do 12 hour shifts. We have a great relationship with the team that cared for us and actually visited them on Thea’s first birthday, and even brought a cake.
In the moment everything is a blur and it takes a while to come to the realisation of what’s actually happening; I remember Jamie being so strong in the hospital, and it wasn’t until we got home and walked into the kitchen, and the prep machine we’d opened just a few days before in the excitement of learning how to use it was sat there, and thats all it took to finally hit him that his little girl wasn’t coming home.
We’d had contact through the hospital with a TinyLife rep and they pointed us towards lots of services that specialised in bereavement, and they made sure to check in with us intermittently through that journey.
We were told how rare this was to happen and we’d have to be exceptionally unlucky to experience anything similar again. So we thought this was the end of our difficult baby journey, we were wrong.
We had another little girl named Felicity in November 2023 born at 24+0 weeks and weighed 636g. Felicity spent 104 days in the Royal Victoria hospitals NICU. There we met the lovely Helen from TinyLife and she was the light and craic we needed. That friendly smile and chat, absolute beats the beeps of the machines in the NICU. Helen made sure not only was Felicity OK but that we were taking time for ourselves. We had never planed to breastfeed, but when Felicity came it was made very clear that it would be a positive thing to help her chances. We had nothing to support this, and again in came TinyLife with the breast pump loan service. We were able to have a medical grade pump (the same one used in the Royal NICU) at home, allowing Jess to build up reserves to keep our hungry, fighting baby going.
Felicity finally got home a few days before Thea’s first birthday, that was a whole complex set of emotions that neither of us think we could put on paper.
The saying “It takes a village to raise a child”, I’m pretty sure they were talking about TinyLife. We’ve been fortunate enough for Felicity to experience, NICU support, baby massage, developmental check ins, walks, all the way down to the Whatsapp groups where no question its laughed at. We couldn’t be more thankful of the support we’ve had.
Thank you to everyone at TinyLife, the work you do allows families like us to do everything we can to succeed.
Jamie, Jess, Felicity & Thea