October is a difficult month for Gill Lee. It’s pregnancy and baby loss awareness month, with pregnancy and baby loss awareness day taking place on October 15th. But October also marks the second anniversary of her baby son Danny, who Gill lost when she was just over five months pregnant.
“I didn’t know about child loss awareness month,” she says. “I was completely unaware until it happened to me.” She has photos of her son, “but probably not enough. That’s one thing I’d tell mams now if I got the chance.”
Gill has two other children, 17-year-old Ellarose and three-year-old Claudia. Getting pregnant was always straightforward, “and so we took it for granted. We never found out on the girls what we were having, but we did find out the gender on Danny. And when we found out he was a boy, it was like winning the lotto.
“Everything was fine, pregnancy-wise. The only thing that worried me was that I had an anterior placenta [when the placenta attaches to the front wall of the womb] on Danny, which meant that I couldn’t feel his kicks.”
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Having already had a private gender scan, she attended the hospital scan at 22 weeks with no worries at all and looking forward to seeing her baby again. Gill lay down on the bed and turned to the monitor to watch.
“I’m looking at the screen and I’m thinking, ‘Why can’t I see the flicker of his heartbeat on the screen?’”
She moved on the bed to try to make it easier for the sonographer to scan him. “I started to notice that she was squeezing my arm. And I thought to myself, ‘Why is she consoling me?’
“She said to me, ‘I’m just going to pop out for a second. I grabbed her by the arm and I said to her: ‘But you can hear his heartbeat and you can see it?’ She looked at me and she said, ‘I can’t,’ and she left the room.
“I don’t have many more fine-detailed memories after that because I think we just lost it. I turned to Cathal [Danny’s father] and I said: ‘Danny’s gone.’”
Gill struggled with what followed as she tried to absorb the enormity of her loss. “Another nurse came into us with a load of pamphlets about what happens next. There was no real sit down and have a human conversation. It was, ‘have a read of that and that’ll explain everything’. She walked into a room with two tablets in a cup and said, ‘you’re going to take them now and that’s going to bring on labour’.”
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Gill refused to take the tablets in that moment because she wanted to go home and tell her daughters and family what had happened. I needed to “keep him with me”.
“I always say if they had said to me, ‘you can keep him in there forever. Nothing’s going to happen to you. He’ll just stay there. And the two of you will just die together in years to come – you’ll live your life with him in there’, I would have done it.”
Telling Ellarose that Danny had died was the hardest thing Gill has ever done, she says. “She was only 15 at the time. It was hard for her to witness her mother fall apart,” Gill explains.
Gill gave birth to Danny in hospital a few days later. “You’re on a labour ward with other women giving birth to live children, and that is horrific,” she recalls, sobbing at the memory. She believes women in her situation should be able to give birth on a different ward. “When you give birth to a baby who has died you hear nothing. There’s literally just silence”.
In spite of her devastation, she says that all she wanted was to try to have the best birth she could. “This was the only thing we got to do with Danny. And the only memory we got to make with him.”
There needs to be someone that meets you, holds your hand through the whole thing, walks you to the grave
— Gill Lee
She admits she was scared to hold her son. “I never held something so small. He was beautiful. He was just a tiny, tiny little version of Cathal.”
She stayed in hospital for a few days afterwards. “We brought the kids up to meet him, and the grandparents, and aunties and uncles came up to meet him. I didn’t force anyone to see him if they didn’t want to.”
The couple learned some weeks later that Danny died due to having an excessively long umbilical cord that was hypercoiled. It had wrapped around his neck twice.
While Gill says the vast majority of staff were very kind in the aftermath of Danny’s death, one particular upsetting incident has stayed with her. A couple of weeks after Danny’s delivery Gill returned to hospital in pain. She discovered tissue had been left behind which had to be removed. As she was prepped for surgery a woman with a crying newborn baby passed by the door. Gill and Cathal’s grief saw them both end up in tears. She explained to a staff member who came in to the room, why they were crying. The staff member, Gill says, replied: “You’re in a maternity ward, what do you expect?”
Danny’s funeral involved a small service in the hospital. Gill and Cathal decided to bury Cathal in the Angels Plot in Glasnevin.
They drove to the cemetery and Gill held Danny’s coffin on her lap. She waited in the car until a solitary gravedigger walked them to the plot.
“The hole in the ground was huge,” she recalls. “There needs to be someone there to explain it to you. There needs to be someone that meets you, holds your hand through the whole thing, walks you to the grave, explains to you ‘there’s going to be a big open hole. We don’t lower him down on the little bands like what happens in other funerals because he’s so small, he could fall off the bands, so someone has to get into the grave and place him in the grave for you’. But you’re not told that information.”
A family member who is a priest said some prayers by the graveside and they played an instrumental version of Danny Boy.
Gill says she would love to have another baby. She has been trying to get pregnant. “We have had three miscarriages and a failed round of IVF since Danny. We’re desperate to have another child. We’re desperate not to leave it on that note.”
She’s trying to mind every aspect of her health as best she can. She lost 7st (44kg) to try to increase her chances. “I do believe it will happen for us. I do believe the fact of not [having a viable pregnancy] since Danny has nearly made his loss more profound,” she says.
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“While I completely understand I’m not getting pregnant on Danny again, that I would be getting pregnant on a whole new baby, I do believe that it would help the healing process. It would give us something joyous to look forward to in the future.
“Danny is everywhere in our home. We talk about him all the time. He is part of our family.”
- Féileacáin (stillbirth and neonatal death support) - (085) 249 6464, admin@feileacain.ie
- Miscarriage Association of Ireland - (087) 365 6887, (086) 893 0748, info@miscarriage.ie
