Today I'm going to write about something that I have noticed during my NICU experience with Oliver and Matthew, and also during this pregnancy.
Infant loss and stillbirth DO NOT discriminate... neither does high risk pregnancy.
I mean, there are things that you could do that wouldn't do you and your babies and favours. Perhaps if you downed a bottle of vodka for breakfast before smoking 40 a day and finishing off with a few lines of cocaine then things might not go according to plan. But, by and large, if you go in to a neonatal unit, or to a group for bereaved parents you would find people from all ages, classes and walks of live.
It annoys me greatly when people, generally well meaning, say things like. "Oh but your feeling much healthier this time round right?" The answer is "not really" If anything I feel much less healthy this time round with all the resting and not being able to do much!
Oliver and Matthew were born following a straightforward twin pregnancy. I'd been really good with what I was eating, I had had 3 glasses of wine the whole time and that was largely because I turned 30 in September! I had been to pregnancy yoga, gone swimming every week, never missed a medical appointment and had been really trying to take it a bit easier too (which as a person I find really hard). But they still came 15 1/2 weeks early. And even though we now think we know the reason why, I have no risk factors (apart from the twins thing) for having cervical incompetency. It was just one of those things, a horrendous thing to happen, but genuinely just terrible bad luck.
To illustrate my point that these things can, and do happen to anyone, I'm going to point you in the direction of a few interesting bits of writing on the web. Last night Chris and I were talking about names again as we still aren't 100% sure. At this point I remembered that Alex James, bassist and cheese maker, had twins with brilliant names, (Artemas and Galileo for the record but don't worry guys, those names arn't on the list). I am a huge fan of Blur and have been since I was in my teens, and even went to Paris to see them when I couldn't get tickets in the UK. Infact Oliver and Matthew went to a Blur gig in utero.. although I'm not sure how much they appreciated it.
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| Me, Matthew and Oliver at London Live, I'm pretty sure that 16 week old foetuses enjoy '90's indie music! |
Anyway, Alex James' twins were born very prematurely, out of the blue, and he wrote this article about it for the Independent. I really like it and think it is very true to life and moving. I paticulaly like the quote from the Dr:
"Don't be ridiculous, you don't want twins. It's complicated. It's risky. Have them one at a time."
The other piece that I wanted to share with you all, you might have already seen because it became a bit of a Facebook hit last year.
I'm sure lots of you will remember the sad stillbirth of Gary Barlow (Take That) and his wife Dawn's daughter Poppy just over a year ago. It was during the Olympics and there was much debate on social media over whether he would perform at the closing ceremony or not (which somewhat ironically coincided exactly with the Blur London live gig that I was at).
At the time, even though it was before we lost Oliver and Matthew, I remember thinking that people should just leave them be. I now realise how hard it would have been to be in his position. Crikey, if after we lost our boys, every random tabloid reporter and the population of social media websites was giving their half baked opinions on when I should go back to work I would have been in bits! To be honest, I think when you are that famous you are pretty much damned if you do and damned if you don't.
The comedian Jason Manford wrote about this on his blog- It is quite long but it's worth reading to the end.
Some food for thought there....
Speaking of food I better get off for some lunch, I'm eating for 3 remember!
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