Liana Stemp, 40, had to say goodbye to her baby, just weeks after he was born
My baby’s tiny hand gripped my finger as I sang Three Little Birds to him through tears. His beautiful dark eyes stared up at me, filling me with love. The Bob Marley song had been playing when Brandon was born, and I often found myself singing it to him as I spent hours at his bedside in hospital.
I hadn’t had an easy pregnancy with Brandon. It had taken me and my husband, Kevin, 37, four years to decide to try for another baby following the birth of our daughter, Elisia. I’d suffered birth trauma, PTSD and PND after her arrival in 2013.
So, I was nervous but excited when I fell pregnant again in 2018. I’d had epilepsy as a child, which I’d grown out of, but I suffered a seizure late in my pregnancy with Elisia, so doctors monitored me this time around.
Everything was fine until the week of my 16-week scan. I was in the car leaving the supermarket car park when everything went black. I wasn’t driving fast, but Elisia, then six, was with me, and the car ended up in a bush, with her locked in the back while I had a seizure in the front. I came to in an ambulance that some passersby had called.
Luckily, Elisia was unharmed and I was flooded with relief when a scan showed that the baby was fine too. I’d developed prenatal epilepsy, though, and I was put on medication to try and prevent further seizures.
It was a worry, but Kevin and I were delighted at the scan that week when we discovered we were having a boy. But our joy was wiped out by the concerned look on the sonographer’s face.
‘It looks like his stomach is sitting a little higher than it should be,’ she explained.
She referred us to Worthing Hospital, where I was due to give birth, and they called us the following morning.
‘Don’t google anything, but we think your baby might have a congenital diaphragmatic hernia [CDH],’ the nurse said. I managed to stay away from the internet on my phone, but Kevin called me later that day from work, in tears.
‘It’s awful,’ he wept. I had to look for myself then. I was in shock as I read that CDH is a condition where the baby’s diaphragm doesn’t form as it should. In some babies, the organs in the abdomen, such as the bowels and stomach, go through the hole in the diaphragm. These organs take up space where the lungs and heart should be, and the lungs don’t grow as expected.
TERRIFYING TIME
It seemed that the condition could be treatable, but in severe cases, the baby might not even survive the pregnancy. I was distraught, and tha
