FOR Elle Wright, nothing will ever be as painful as the moment she watched her son Teddy take his last breath in her arms.
He would have been three in May, but he never made it home from hospital – he died three days after being born.
Elle Wright
Nine months after losing Teddy – and suffering a devastating miscarriage – Elle, 33, from Surrey, decided to write a blog about her experience.
Six months in she was approached to write a book, which she entitled Ask Me His Name: Learning to Live and Laugh Again After the Loss of My Baby.
Here she tells Fabulous Digital why it’s so important to her to change the conversation around child loss…
THERE isn’t a name in society for someone who’s lost a child. It’s almost like we haven’t allowed a name for it because if we do that then it’s real, it’s happening around us.
Elle Wright
Being told your baby is going to die is a difficult feeling to put into words. It felt like I was watching it happen in slow motion to somebody else, thinking ‘No, this can’t be happening to me. This kind of stuff happens to other people.’
I found out I was pregnant in September 2015, a year and a half after my husband Nico (33) and I got married.
When Nico got home I came barrelling down the stairs and – cheesy, I know – told him to close his eyes and hold out his hands, like my grandmother used to do when she was giving us a treat.
I put the test in his hand and remember him looking at it for a good few seconds before what I was telling him sunk in – then he broke out into the biggest grin. It was such a wonderful moment.
I had a really normal, healthy pregnancy, which I think we all assume means a healthy baby at the end of it. I think that’s why, particularly in mothers who’ve been through infant death, there’s a huge associated guilt because we tell ourselves we should have known something was wrong.
My waters broke on Sunday 15 May, four days before my due date, and I gave birth to Teddy at the Royal Surrey Hospital in Guildford at around 6:30pm on the Monday.
Even though I had a good labour, when he came out he was quiet and floppy. A midwife whisked him away while another reassured me it was quite normal, he just needed a rub down and some oxygen to stimulate his breathing. After 20 minutes a smiling consultant returned with Teddy in his arms.
Elle Wright
One thing that was different about Teddy was he never cried. His eyes only semi-opened for a brief moment when he yawned during his first feed, but I could see that they were the same crystal blue as Nico’s. They reassured me that he was just sleepy, but that night the midwife woke me at 10pm telling me he was a little cold and could probably do with a cuddle.
At 1:30am she woke me again, but this time she shook me hard and said Teddy was really cold and with that I saw her lift him out of the cot and his little arms fell limply by his sides.
I have never woken up so quickly in my life. Nico and I both sat bolt upright, and as she sprinted away I knew in that moment something was horribly wrong. It was terrifying.
I remember thinking in that moment, ‘He’s dead.’ After about 20 minutes a senior midwife moved us into a waiting room. I knew it wasn’t good news.
Elle Wright
The consultant said we had a really poorly little boy. He wasn’t breathing when they found him and they’d revived him after 18 minutes, but didn’t know what damage had been done to his brain. They needed to transfer him to a specialist neonatal unit and luckily they found space for him at Ashford and St. Peter’s Hospital in Chertsey.
He was moved on the Tuesday morning, there all day Tuesday and Wednesday, then on Thursday 19th in the afternoon they gave us the news that would change our lives forever and told us that there was nothing they could do for him and that he would die that day.
Looking back, I think I still felt hopeful he would be coming home with us, but when they delivered the news that he wasn’t, in that moment I felt like my life was over.
We has a matter of hours left with our beautiful Teddy, so we gathered as much family as we could to be by his side.
Elle Wright
I’m so close to my mum, and I remember looking at her face crumbling and thinking, ‘S***, I’ve caused this pain, this is all my fault, I have brought this awful heartbreak upon our whole family.’ I now know she was looking at me thinking why couldn’t she protect me.
I didn’t want Teddy being “switched off” in a room full other babies, and the hospital kindly gave us a room in the bereavement suite – which I now know not all hospitals have – which is shocking given 15 babies die every day in the UK.
We were able to bathe him, cuddle him, dress him in a nice little romper suit and do all the normal things we hadn’t been able to because he had been connected up to all the machines. The nurse hand-pumped oxygen into his lungs before handing him over to us.
Elle Wright
As he took his last breaths we could see his little body shaking, trying unsuccessfully to take little breaths, and as we read him a story – a picture borrowed from his cousin called Guess How Much I Love You – he died in my arms.
I comfort myself with the fact he could feel us holding him and knew everyone in that room loved him. I like to think he felt safe and wasn’t scared.
It was five months before we recieved the post-mortem results, which was really tough. We felt like we were living in limbo and my imagination ran wild – had I done something wrong?
I actually found out five months after Teddy died that I was pregnant again, but sadly we lost that baby as well at 15 weeks. Everyone says lightening doesn’t strike twice, but I tell you what, it does.
Elle Wright
They found Teddy had a metabolic condition called 3-methylglutaconic aciduria (3MGA) – the first recorded case in a newborn baby in the UK. We were told the chances of any baby being born with that was about 250,000 – so it just bad luck, for want of a better expression.
In one respect you think, ‘Great it couldn’t happen again’ – but then you think, ‘If it’s that bloody uncommon why’d it have to happen to us?’
Six days after he died we had a visit from a bereavement midwife who hadn’t even bothered to learn Teddy’s name. Though some people don’t get a visit at all – it all comes down to individual hospital funding. There are women all over the country who just get a pile of leaflets put in their hand with a “sorry your baby died, see you later”.
I then received a call from my obstetrician’s secretary asking me if I wanted to make an appointment to discuss the delivery of my baby. When I told them my baby died there was an awkward silence followed by a garbled apology.
Elle Wright
A follow-up letter arrived a few days later which said: “I am very sorry to hear about the unfortunate outcome of your pregnancy.” Teddy had apparently become an “unfortunate outcome” rather than a person, my son.
Three months after I lost Teddy I saw woman in the park I’d met at a yoga class while pregnant whose baby had been born in the same hospital a day later. She was in the middle of a group of mums with their new babies, but when she saw me she turned away.
I heard her say, “That’s Elle, who I was telling you about,” when she thought I was out of earshot. It was probably the singularly most miserable moment of my existence after Teddy dying and getting through his funeral. I’d been unceremoniously booted out of the Mummy Club.
Losing Teddy had made me feel hollow and like I didn’t have a purpose, but this chain of unfortunate events made me angry and frustrated at the world.
Why does no one seem to recognise that I had a son, and that he has a name, and that he was alive for three days? Why do people want me to pretend that he wasn’t?
I found myself hopelessly searching the Internet but I couldn’t find anything that spoke to me. With child loss, because it’s not spoken a lot about, all of the blogs and threads out there were utterly miserable – nothing told me that one day I was going to laugh and feel normal and have a great day again. So I decided to take all the experiences I’d had over the last nine months and start my own blog – and five months later I was approached to write a book.
Elle Wright
I think the problem with child loss is that it defies the natural order, which makes it a terrifying subject for society. It’s difficult enough to deal with it if it’s happened to you, but for someone who has children or sees themselves having them one day, the thought of one of them dying, you daren’t go there.
Meeting other women who’ve been through child loss has been incredibly helpful – I think it’s human nature that when something of this magnitude happens to us, we want to seek out other people to whom that has happened and hear positive stories because it makes us feel better.
Elle Wright
Last year Nico and his friends raised £30,000 for the neonatal unit to buy a new special care baby cot by cycling down France for 1500km over a weekAfter the Mummy Club incident in the park I also wanted to highlight to people that the uncomfortableness they might feel in that moment is nothing compared to the feeling the person who it’s happened to has to carry around on their shoulders every day. That was two and half years ago now, but it’s never left me.
It was important to me to make sure it wasn’t all doom and gloom.
I didn’t just want it to be a support book; I wanted it to be a book anyone can pick up and read in order to equip themselves better in society. You never know when you’re going to strike up an innocent conversation with somebody and say, ‘Do you have any kids?’ and the answer won’t be the one you were expecting.
How do you follow that up? Do you go silent? Do you change the subject? Or, do you talk about that person’s child, ask them a question, acknowledge that child was here and it’s still their child.
I couldn’t face going back to my old job. I kept imagining sitting in meetings with clients who’d seen me go off on maternity leave and explaining to each of them what had happened, and that felt like a special kind of mental torture.
I didn’t want to quit – I’d worked hard for 15 years to get where I was, but I couldn’t go in and pretend everything was fine because I didn’t feel fine. I also couldn’t bring myself to give a s*** about skincare anymore.
I now volunteer at the Ashtead and St Peter’s Hospital fund for the neonatal unit – I’ve been doing that since 2017. Between us, Nico and I have raised £125,000 for the unit.
Follow Elle on Instagram here and read her blog.
As Me His Name by Elle Wright is published by Lagom and is out in paperback now priced £8.99. A portion of the proceeds from the sales of this book will be donated to Tommy’s charity.
Here grieving parents reveal the things you should NEVER say to someone who’s suffered a miscarriage.
