I walked to the health centre without a care in the world... I wouldn’t be home for weeks
READ FIONA LOONEY’S BRILLIANT COLUMN
SHE will be 21 years old in a couple of months – and all the talk in our house is of whether she will squeeze in a party before she heads to New York on her J-1.
A brilliant songwriter, a rather hard worker, a reasonably good cook, a clutterbug, a girl with the attention span of a gnat who sometimes tries to go running in her Converse and then has to lie down on a park bench.
She loves her music, her books, her dog, her boyfriend, her friends, and us.
She occupies a significant, special space in this world, my girl. And if it hadn’t been for a foetal heart monitor, she wouldn’t be here at all.
Everything about the end of my first pregnancy was terrifying.
I had no idea that anything was wrong until a routine check-up at almost 32 weeks showed that I had protein in my urine and my blood pressure was significantly elevated. Pre-eclampsia. I had walked from my home to the health centre for the appointment with my arms swinging and without a care in the world. It would be two weeks before I went home again.
On the first day, transferred to hospital in what I recall now as a sort of surreal, confused panic, they attached me to a foetal heart monitor. As soon as I heard my baby’s rapid, little heartbeat, I calmed down. She was fine. The line on the trace began to mark out its regular little leaps, and order seemed restored.
As long as baby was stable and doing well, they said, they would keep me in hospital, drugged and monitored, and together we would try to get us both a bit closer to our due date.
In the days that followed, my condition gradually deteriorated. But every time they attached me to that heart monitor, there she was, strong and true. The only time I breathed easily in those scary days was when I was on that machine. I trusted it. She was doing great. I was running out of road, but she would be fine.
After a week, the doctors decided to induce labour. I was 32 weeks and five days pregnant. My own body had rallied a little overnight, and so a window of sorts had presented itself. They set up the Oxytocin drip, turned on the foetal heart monitor (and the television) and off we went.
But she was too small. As the labour pains became more intense, the foetal heart monitor showed that her little heart beat was beginning to fluctuate.
Simply, she was being squashed by her contracting surroundings, and her own tiny body couldn’t cope with the stress.
To this day, I have no idea how long it took from that point until she was out and rushed off to neo-natal intensive care; sometimes it feels like minutes, other times it feels like a lifetime.
I know that everyone in the room looked at the machine, checked the trace, listened to that struggling heart and then the world and everyone in it sped up, I was being raced to theatre for an emergency C-section and then she was born.
ITRUSTED the machine, and I trusted that the medical professionals knew what to do. I think most first-time mothers do. Giving birth is a daunting, occasionally terrifying experience and in our first encounter with it, we trust that the people who do it every day will guide us, mothers and babies both, safely through it.
Machines exist for a reason, and when it works, technology is as miraculous as birth itself. And people might say that my daughter and I were lucky because our machine and the people surrounding it worked properly on that June day in 1997.
But we weren’t lucky, not really. We were just routine. A little life saved by a machine designed to save lives.
And I don’t believe that Róisín Molloy was unlucky, because the outcomes of stories like hers and mine should not depend on the roll of a dice. I cannot imagine what Róisín and Mark Molloy are going through – and have gone through every day since the death of their newborn baby boy, Mark, four years ago.
But I do know that no expectant mother going into hospital ever imagines that her journey will end with a graveyard and a Medical Council inquiry.
Even when we don’t trust our own bodies or those tiny new lives inside us, we trust the machines, we trust the professionals.
Maybe we are wrong to do so. But even if it terrifies every expectant mother, the Molloys deserve to know the truth. We all do.