I expected a healthy girl... but a deadly nightmare unfolded
Recalls the traumatic early days of her daughter Sophie’s life
On the morning my daughter was born a doctor uttered the shattering words, “She’s one of the sickest babies I’ve ever seen. I’m afraid I can’t predict a good outcome.”
When I went into labour with my first child, I expected a perfect waterbirth. I expected everything to go smoothly. I expected a beautiful, healthy little girl.
What actually unfolded was a terrifying life-or-death nightmare.
And without the unbelievable skill and dedication of NHS doctors and nurses, our baby would have died.
Sophie, now eight, was born in February 2016, in North London, weighing 8lb. I was 26, fit, healthy and had had a completely straightforward pregnancy.
Everything was textbook when my waters broke a week after my due date and throughout the labour and delivery – so it came as a complete shock that Sophie was born blue, floppy, unresponsive and making no respiratory effort.
My husband, Jamie, now 36 and a garden designer, was waiting for that piercing cry. That shriek that reveals life is beginning as air fills the lungs.
Instead, there was choking. Gurgling, like a small animal trapped in a drain.
SNATCHED
The midwife took one look at Sophie, hit the emergency buzzer on the labour ward wall and the room filled with doctors who had sprinted up five flights of stairs from A&E to come to her rescue.
It was 4am and they were busy and exhausted, yet they came and brought her back from the brink of death.
I wasn’t allowed to see or touch my new baby; she was snatched from the bed by gloved hands to be resuscitated.
When she was 10 minutes old, she was put on a ventilator in a desperate bid to oxygenate her little body.
As I was being stitched up, a young doctor on the other side of the room stood urgently suctioning fluid from Sophie’s lungs as she lay dying in front of us, her lungs so full of fluid the ventilator could not do its job.
Jamie was caught between shock and curiosity. He knew but couldn’t know… Death was waiting in that room and there was no dignity or mercy. We have no doubt that doctor’s actions saved Sophie’s life.
Then, before I could take in what was happening, she was gone, rushed to critical care in a different part of the hospital. Jamie followed the medical team, to watch the ongoing fight for our baby’s life, and I was left in the delivery room alone.
No baby, no husband, no knowledge. I didn’t know where she was, what was wrong with her or even whether she was still alive.
I saw Sophie for the first time when she was a few hours old. She was naked except for a nappy, covered in wires, tubes and plasters, her face obscured by a ventilator.
The doctors explained that she had “overwhelming” sepsis and hypoxic-ischaemic encephalopathy (HIE) - brain damage caused by oxygen deprivation. She had also inhaled large amounts of meconium (a baby’s first stool) causing exceptionally severe meconium aspiration syndrome.
And she had persistent pulmonary hypertension of the neonate (PPHN), a potentially fatal condition that stops a baby breathing effectively. As they scribbled “Baby Innes” across her ever-growing pile of
medical notes, the staff in critical care asked us her name and we admitted we were yet to decide. I remember a profound sense we had to name her as soon as possible. We were terrified she would die without a name. We couldn’t let that happen.
At about 9am, a transfer team became available and Sophie was moved to intensive care at University College London Hospital (UCLH). Too sick for a normal ambulance, she was taken by the London Neonatal Transport Service (NTS) in their intensive care ambulance. The care and expertise was overwhelming; we couldn’t believe the amount of time, skill, manpower and money being employed to save our baby.
There’s no doubt that without this rapid and effective response Sophie would have died very quickly. I sat in a wheelchair, tears streaming down my face, and watched as my baby and husband left the hospital without me.
I found myself abandoned in a bereavement room, constantly trying to reassure myself she must still be fighting because, surely, someone would have told me if she had died. At UCLH, Sophie was admitted to neonatal intensive care and transferred to the ominously nicknamed Last Chance Ventilator – an oscillating ventilator used rarely and only when nothing else works.
Her whole body was also cooled to 33 degrees for three days to protect her brain from further damage.
For 10 days Sophie’s life hung in the
Death was waiting in that room. There was no dignity, no mercy
balance. She was too unstable to be held or even to have her nappy changed; the slightest interference would cause her vital statistics to go haywire. We lived in a perpetual hell of uncertainty; we had no idea whether our baby would live, whether we would ever take her home, and what her life might look like. At a week old, an infection caused her to deteriorate so significantly she wasn’t expected to survive the night. That evening I lay in bed worrying that I didn’t know how to go about planning any funeral, let alone that of a newborn who no one had ever got the chance to know.
Miraculously, when she was 10 days old, the antibiotics kicked in and Sophie suddenly turned a corner. We were able to hold her for the first time. She was taken off the ventilator and, on my birthday, was moved out of intensive care. In total, she spent three weeks in hospital and detailed testing and follow-up showed that, against all the odds, she had suffered no long-term damage. For years the traumatic memories of Sophie’s birth swirled around my head.
Every time I looked at her, I saw the baby who nearly died, who I watched being resuscitated, who I sat beside as she fought for her life.
Every milestone was a reminder of the nights spent living in fear of our phones ringing, of the call to say she had died. I had been a health journalist in my early 20s and when Sophie turned three, it suddenly hit me that I needed to write. That the only way to free myself of these haunting memories was to commit them to paper. For months I typed and typed, allowing the story to pour out of me.
As I reached the end of the account, I began to realise I had written a book – a book which turned out to be one long and heartfelt thank you letter to the NHS; an expression of our love for our daughter and our gratitude to those miracle workers who enabled us to keep her. They are heroes and we are immensely grateful to them. Jamie and I remain in awe of the skill, kindness and dedication of Sophie’s consultant at UCLH, Dr Giles Kendall, and every single one of his colleagues who helped to save Sophie’s life. We will never forget that without them we would not have had the privilege of getting to know this precious little girl. Emma Innes’s book, In Their Hands (£9.99, Waterstones), is out now. All proceeds go to Early Lives, the charity of the UCLH neonatal unit