If only I were a somebody

I know most of you don’t know my full story and what happened to Hope, but I’m putting it all together to post over the next few weeks/days.

For now, I rant.

I can’t help but wonder if I was someone more significant, if I mattered, if Hope mattered, she’d be here.

Bear with me here.

There is a certain strawberry-haired, tall, Australian actress who for the most part, I was pregnant with at exactly the same time. We all know how her story finished up. Nine beautiful months carrying the child, then the happy ending we all assume we are going to get.

But for me, this is obviously not how it turned out. Hence this here blog.

I was past my due date, in labour, in pain, at hospital but sent home. I was treated like a number. Just another first time mother, probably overreacting at the first sign of a contraction, I wasn’t far enough along, so I was sent home to battle through my early labour alone and without any medical help. Guess they just really needed that bed for someone else, someone else bursting to push I suppose.

I’m sure this particular actress wouldn’t have been sent home if she were in my shoes. She probably had her obstetrician move in with her at her country ranch from 36 weeks onwards, had an ultrasound machine at her home (like that twit of an ex-husband of hers) and probably had an ambulance parked out the front for those last few weeks ready to whisk her away at the first sign of the baby making an appearance. There would have been so many people making a fuss over her, making sure everything was perfect.

Jealousy is raging inside me like a wild, out of control bush fire these days. As if it isn't hard enough seeing the bulk our friends blissfully happy with their children or pregnant and innocent, but seeing her lying peacefully cheek to cheek with her cherub-faced baby splashed all over the front pages of newspapers lately, just makes me want to barf. I deserve what she got. I do matter. Hope matters.

I realise I’m probably being completely irrational, but today, this is how I feel. That if I was a somebody, someone people were interested in, not just another woman at a big, busy and over-burdened public hospital, Hope would be here, and I’d have got my happy ending.

Someone should have taken more notice of me.

I kept hearing the midwives say they can know a lot about a labouring woman just by the tone of her voice on the phone. So why is it then, they couldn’t “hear” the bacteria, harmless to us adults most of the time but fatal to newborns, creep its way in and kill my daughter?

All it took was for one of them to say “you know what, just come back in and we’ll check you over, better to be safe than sorry.”

But I was told to stay at home and wait. And wait I did. And four days past her due date, she was dead. Five days past her due date, she was born and our world crashed down.

Had I gone back in, they would have been able to see my baby was in distress. Distress. I hate to even think about my child being in distress, inside of me no less, right under my beating heart. They could have delivered her in a hurry. I realise the infection still might have been too severe and she may have died soon after birth, or been very sick for a long time. But then again a NICU stay and course of antibiotics might have saved her, and phew, wouldn’t we count ourselves lucky that we acted fast and caught this infection in time. But we’ll never know and I’ll always wonder. Always.

I think medical complacency had a lot to do with Hope’s death (as well as a nice dose of maternal oblivion) but I just wish someone had been more thorough with me. Or that maybe, at some stage during the 40 weeks, someone had said “you know babies can and do just up and die inside women at the end of pregnancy, quite often, without warning or any symptoms, so just be vigilant and come to hospital if you’re worried about anything.” Sure this would have scared the hell out of me, but it would have made me more aware. Four days past my due date, I was more worried about me and the pain I was in. I wasn’t worried about the baby. She was a sure thing. Until she wasn’t.

As I’ve come to learn with stillbirths, it is better swept under the carpet and not spoken about, even by the medical professionals taking care of us, who obviously see these sorts of thing more than we realise. Just deal with it when and if it happens, which means most of the time, completely blindsiding people. Doesn’t happen most of the time though, you know 99 per cent of babies are born alive. It is just that one in 100 who doesn’t make it in to their family’s waiting arms. I thought it only happened to “other people”.

Now I am one of those “other people” and I don’t like it.

Being sad is hard enough. I wish I wasn’t so angry, too.