"They managed to find me a small room, but I noticed a foul toilet smell" – Molly's Story #FamiliesKeptApart

I went into the hospital on the 2nd or 3rd of January 2023 with really bad preeclampsia. It got so bad that I lost my vision and couldn't see anything and I was all swollen all over. We were just kind of holding out day by day trying to get me as far along in the pregnancy as possible. I was due on the 27th of February, but by the 3rd of February, my placenta had started to separate, and I had placental lakes so the amniotic fluid was leaking out.  

The doctors decided to do a sweep that night and then take me down for an induction the next day. I hadn't seen fresh air for about four weeks, so they told me I could go out and get some air in the morning before the induction. I had all the observations in the morning, and we were happy to go ahead with the induction. They told me to go have some lunch, walk around, get my birthing partners up, and get ready to go. My mom and my sister came up to the hospital and we went down to the café. While we were sitting there, my mom noticed I went really pale and didn't feel well at all.

I decided to head back to the ward, but it was a ten minute walk from the café. Halfway there, my legs gave out and I couldn't walk anymore. We grabbed a wheelchair and carried on, but when we reached the doors to the birthing suites, I fell out of the wheelchair. I was petrified of a C-section, but I didn't think I had it in me to go through hours of labour only to end up needing one anyway so I decided to go ahead with one.

In the theatre, I started shaking again and was determined to stay awake, but the doctors weren't sure if I could. Eventually, they delivered my daughter, but there was this eerie silence. I knew something was wrong. I felt ice-cold, and although I was numb from the spinal, my whole body felt off.

All I could see over the curtain was the door opening and closing. The room was so quiet it was like there was no one in there. The anaesthetist next to me didn’t answer me when I asked what was happening, and the midwife peeked over and said they were having some complications. When I asked about my daughter, she didn’t say anything. I asked my mum to stand up and look over the curtain and she saw that I was haemorrhaging and my daughter wasn't in the room. They had already taken her to the NICU because she was unresponsive and had severe blood loss. She couldn't maintain oxygen levels, and her lungs weren't filling properly.

The NICU doctor explained later that our different blood types had mixed, causing a reaction. My daughter wasn't producing her own blood, and she needed a full-body blood transfusion. The process involved draining her blood from one side and filling her with new blood from the other. I signed the paperwork for the transfusion, before I realised it meant I couldn't see her for 48 to 72 hours, because I was still a patient.

At that moment that felt like a lifetime.  I never really understood when people used to say that once you've given birth you feel a sort of loneliness in your body, but I did then. I felt so alone and so empty and I felt like no one knew what was going on, no one understood. When she was having the transfusion and my amazing midwife went round and took a picture for me.

On her ninth day in the NICU, the hospital needed the room I had been staying in for someone in labour, so they packed up my belongings and left them in the hallway. It was six weeks’ worth of belongings just left there. It felt like I had gone from being cared for to being abandoned. I wasn't discharged, but they had nowhere for me to stay. They suggested making up a bed on the ward, but it was just a ‘maybe’.

They did manage to find me a small room, but when I first when in there I noticed a foul toilet smell. I told the nurse said the smell was coming from a pipe that had burst eight months ago that hadn’t been fixed and suggested I spray room perfume to cover the smell. It was a shock, because it just came across so normal to them, like that was a normal thing. The locks on the doors didn't work, so I had no privacy. My mum was still showering me at this point as I was still struggling with mobility, and someone once walked in on us during a shower and tried to carry on having a conversation and my mum had to ask if they could come back in a minute.

Food was another challenge. I only had access to a small kitchen that staff and other patients used that only had a microwave and a toaster. The amount of times I would go in there and someone would be doing their dinner and I thought – OK I'll wait. I didn't want to linger in the hallway, I’d go back to the room. I’d come back and someone else would be in there. I had to get someone constantly running to and from the hospital because you've got to make yourself food but you're not allowed to leave the hospital but there's nowhere for you to store food. You've got no fridge to put a ready meal in until later on. So, someone was literally bringing me breakfast, having to come back at lunch to bring me lunch, coming to bring me dinner. It just felt like I was so far away from the rest of the world that everyone was living in.

I think NICUs are so underfunded and not classed as a priority. Yes, there are places in hospitals that need funding but the NICU really is one of them. They literally keep babies alive and I think that's bypassed. I did quite a lot of fundraising through 2023 and I abseiled off the maternity tower and people that would say – ‘So, a NICU is just a baby nursery’. It’s not a baby nursery. It's literally keeping sick children alive. Every single one of them keeps children alive.  

 I think I'm biased because I'm her mum, but Athea is the most amazing child. She only just turned two, but she has full conversations with me! She's still really small, she's only wearing nine to twelve months clothes. I look at her and think, you were as small as the palm of my hand and now you're as big as my torso.