Fee's World

Radio silence broken once more. We are now a family of four!

Miss Wriggles arrived at the start of August, 38 weeks gestation, not so wriggly. I went into labour naturally and was progressing nicely, visualising the sea lapping in and out of a cave, candles lit, birth pool at the ready, Leonard Cohen singing us his greatest hits, when Wriggles’ heart rate decelerated, we lost it then found it again at 60bpm, a far cry from it’s previous 150bpm. Home birth wasn’t to be so off we went to hospital to get hooked up to a scanner. We were always of the mind that if there was even the slightest problem we’d head to hospital, no questions.
On arrival at hospital her heartrate was down at 40bpm, they broke my water in order to get s clip on babies head but when they did there was ++ meconium.

Wriggles was born shortly after by crash emergency c-section. I lost a lot of blood but that was the least of our worries, our little girl was essentially stillborn, apgar 0 at birth and 5 minutes. She was resuscitated for 15 minutes, thankfully she had a flicker of a heartbeat and the crash team decided to keep going.

She was transferred for 72 hours cooling at St Peter’s hospital in Chertsey. She spent a further 2 weeks in NICU then 3 weeks back in SCBU at our local hospital.

She was diagnosed with Grade III (severe) HIE (hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy) at 4 weeks, or ay least that was the first we heard. We were told she is highly likely to have cerebral palsy.

3 months on, I sit here with my baby girl in my arms and know that I am so extremely lucky to have her. She has her difficulties and will have special needs for life, but she is alive and we’ll do everything we can to make sure she has the best life possible.

I feel this is the start of a change in purpose of this blog, we are now going down a much less travelled path of natural parenting a child with multiple special needs.