Infant loss: SIDS

on october the 8th 2020 my daughter noah lee was nine weeks old and three days there was nothing out of the ordinary that day in fact it was one of the best days that we'd ever had together she slept so well um she was comfort feeding um i was breastfeeding her and that was my favorite thing to do it took us a while to perfect it but we finally got there and it was the best feeling in the world in fact that night she looked up into my eyes while she was breastfeeding and that was the first time she'd ever done that she usually s stared um kind of past my arm or into my armpit area um but she finally just looked up into my eyes and i just remember thinking yes we made it we did it i just thought that everything was going to be perfect from then i was watching a tv series while noah was sleeping in my arms so i was up quite late that night her dad was supposed to finish work at 10 30 and be home by 11 30 midnight but it was about 1am and i was getting a bit worried he wasn't home yet and he wasn't answering his phone so finally he called me back and he was almost there which was great so we had both had a late night and i was 3 a.m feed um she would usually feed for about 10 minutes and then i would be able to rock her back to sleep straight away pretty much straight away and i was really tired so i was eager to get her straight back down into the best net rather than as she drifted off to hold her in my arms which is what i often did just to make sure that she was in a deep sleep this time i kept trying to lay her down and as soon as i would lay her down she knew she wasn't in my arms again and she would wake up and she would fuss and so i would need to try and settle her on the breast again and then try and put her down and i did that about three times um my husband woke up and he offered to take her to settle her and put her to sleep in the lounge so that i could get some sleep and at first i said no um i knew he was tired too and i knew that i could always get her back to sleep quicker than anyone else but he insisted and i was tired so i let him and as he was walking out the door i remember thinking tell him to bring her back into the room once she's asleep so i can put her in the bassinet and at that point she just started to grizzle she started to cry and so i didn't tell him that because i was being selfish i wanted to sleep so they were in the lounge and it was about four o'clock or between 3 30 and 4 o'clock in the morning at that time and i went straight back to sleep so at 7 am i woke up to brogan yelling and when i first heard the noise i set up and i stopped my sleep timer and i was well roosted and i thought oh she must be hungry she's it's time it's been three hours she's ready to feed um and brogan came running into the room no it was really limp in his arms and brogan was screaming and he was saying she's not responding she's not responding and i was so calm i said calm down her and just lay her down and straight away i started cpr and i see called an ambulance and i was still calm because i thought like everything else i was just gonna fix it she was okay she had to be okay because i was gonna fix it so i started cpr and as soon as the um as soon as the emergency number went through i told them what was happening and i told her to tell me how to do cpr properly and no one was laying on the bed at that time and i hadn't hadn't thought to put her on the floor so it's about 30 seconds to a minute that i was doing it on the bed which is obviously not effective so we laid her on the floor which is at the foot of our bed and her face she looked so peaceful she always slipped with her mouth open and her beautiful eyes she just looked so calm and she felt a little bit cold there was a moment when brogan was kind of tapping her face and he pulled back her eyes to try and open her eyes and she was just staring blankly ahead she just there was nothing there there was just nothing there and that moment i panicked i started to panic a little bit i don't know how long i was doing cpr for but the firemen arrived first and i yelled at them to help her when the ambulance arrived they ended up taking her into the ambulance they had all sorts of things going on that i don't really remember but i was standing in my driveway and my brain was saying knock she has to be fine she's okay nothing bad's gonna happen and then the other half of me would just panic and then i would run it back in panic ran it back in and i just couldn't believe that something was going to be wrong i think part of me also is thinking about how long it had been and i know what happens when you don't have oxygen for too long but i didn't care i just wanted them to fix it i called my parents when they went into the ambulance and i told my mum noah's not breathing and they came straight away um we tried to call brogan's parents it took a long time for them to call back and they also came over um i don't know how long they were working for her working on noah in the driveway um but eventually they said we needed to take her to the hospital and i don't know what that means does that mean that she was okay up at that point that there was a chance that we could get her back or why else would they have taken her to the hospital but anyway we had to get in a separate ambulance and so we drove to the hospital and they took us into a side area i don't really remember much about that um and we were kind of it must have been like an emergency section there was lots of kind of cubbies with curtains separating them i don't think there was anyone else in there i didn't see anyone and hear anyone just the nurses and doctors that were working on noah um they had tubes down her throat they were doing cpr and they had an oxygen mask on her i think um and still i just oh she's coming back she's coming back i didn't want to break down because i didn't want to give up on my baby and then the doctor came in he actually kept saying it's been a long time he hasn't had much oxygen and it made me angry because noah's a girl and i kept correcting him she's a girl and then finally he just said it's been too long and i just fell to the ground and i just screamed and i was crying and i was shocked and i still didn't want to accept it and i quickly got up and touched her because i was laying on the like leaning over the bed trying to touch her trying to talk to her and tell her that i loved her my husband he i think he was screaming i remember he was punching something but eventually he came back and he was holding noah too all the nurses left and it was just me and broken holding noah um both sets of our parents my nana and my brother came too and we were all just kind of sitting there i wrapped noah up in a in a swaddle that i had quickly packed for her to bring to the hospital i don't even remember doing that and there was two social workers i think um they would say things to us i don't really remember exactly what they would say things like did we want to do hand and footprints did we want to do cast of her hands and her feet did we want a photographer here's some funeral information my worst nightmare um they moved us to a room it was kind of just like a lounge area that was closed off um and i just sat there and held my baby and i just held her looked at her and i remember at one point i tried to breathe into my mouth i just felt numb the whole time i was holding my baby i never wanted to let her go but at the same time i just wanted to hurry everything up i just keep thinking to myself i can't keep holding my dead baby i can't keep seeing my daughter like this she was so beautiful and she was losing her essence was gone and i didn't want to remember her like that i didn't want to keep looking at her that way and i regret that so much because i would do anything to hold her right now even if she's still gone i just want to feel her in my arms some other people um family and friends that we knew turned up at the hospital and that made me really upset i didn't want to accept that my baby was gone and all of a sudden there's people here to confirm that she is my brother's cousins bought donuts for everyone and it's the smallest thing and it probably is really thoughtful but it made me so angry who wants donuts with isn't it baby we actually had to speak to some policemen at the hospital um that wasn't hard because it's just words it's just factual stuff it's not how i feel it's not what i think it's what i know the most difficult part of that was telling them that noah was with my husband when she died i love my husband so much and the minute he came running into the room screaming with no i knew i knew what had happened in my head i just thought she rolled her face into his chest and suffocated that's what's going on but i held onto that thought for weeks maybe months after noah died but now i think how could i have known that i i don't actually know that that's what happened and brogan doesn't remember where her face was when he woke up he just felt that she was cold noticed that she wasn't responding and stood up straight away eventually uh the funeral director or the lady who does um embalming she came and she had to take noah away to hamilton which is about one and a half to two hour drive from where we live and i didn't want to leave noah i didn't want to be away from her but there could only be one person that drove with the with this lady and i didn't want to leave my husband so my mother-in-law ended up going with noah and the lady um straight to the hospital in hamilton where they would do an autopsy report on her and my parents and brogan and i drove in our car to hamilton so that we could bring her back the next day so we drove to hamilton and we stayed somewhere that was really close so it was about a two minute walk up to um the mausoleum i think is what they call it we know it was overnight and we sat out there at night for a little while um and then the next day we sat in a waiting room until they brought her out which was so horrific it wasn't until the afternoon maybe three o'clock or four o'clock that they brought her out and they had a knitted hat on her and some little booties and she was wrapped in um in the blanket that i had given then given her to the men and she looked so different she didn't look like my baby she kind of looked swollen she looked so big she wasn't my little baby and you could see where they and we'd been sitting there all day preparing ourselves to see her again knowing that she was gone and still it was like a slap in the face the second emperor right like he's fighting out for the first time again and i feel like that so many times since like it's all just happening for the first time again the initial autopsy report when they brought her back to us at the mausoleum was sids which i already knew because there was nothing wrong with my baby girl she was perfect and i just knew no one had done anything to her brogan would never do anything to her that was that didn't even cross my mind i knew that it was sids which is sudden infant death syndrome and it covers pretty much any infant death that you can't explain which is very broad we still haven't got her autopsy report or the official um coroner's report just say what they think has happened and i don't know what i wanted to say i don't know if i wanted to say sids because then i have zero answers it gives me zero closure but at the same time it means it's something that we couldn't have prevented even though i feel like i could if i had kept her with me that night would she still be alive if i gave her a pacifier that night would she still be alive if i cheated on them earlier would she still be alive but true sense you just can't predict you can't prevent if it's going to happen it's going to happen or do i want them to find a medical illness that we didn't know about that there were no signs for because then it could have been permitted i really don't know what i want or what i need when we first arrived back from hamilton we had to go to the funeral um place where they embarked her just a little bit enough to get her to the monday um they took her away while they did that and then we got to dress her ourselves it was another very difficult thing to say my little girl that didn't look like my little girl anymore laying on this and they had closed her mouth and she always slid with her mouth open so it looked so wrong to me to have her mouth closed and i just wish it was still open the way that she used him when we finally got back from hamilton it was about seven maybe later at night and the house was full of people and they all came out and they were singing these church songs and i freaked out i panicked that there were so many people there that knew my daughter was gone that they were in our house when we wanted to be alone that they were going to see my daughter the way that she was which is not how she truly looked and there were not very many people that got to meet noah when she was born and i didn't want people to meet her for the first time when she was gone but there were so many people there and i didn't want to get out of the car i asked everyone to leave and once everyone had got all their stuff and left the house i took her into the lounge both the seats of our parents were there so we started reading stories to her in the lounge me and my husband people had laid down some mattresses in there and they've rearranged our entire lounge which i understand is was meant to be helpful but it made me very uncomfortable that our house wasn't how it was we know it was here and someone must have turned up late a family friend of um on broken side turned up and they were in our lounge kitchen which is open plan and they were talking with brogan's parents and they were laughing and being i don't know what they were talking about but they were loud they were laughing they were having a good time and i snapped i just yelled at them to get out i just wanted to read stories to my baby and pretend like she was still here and i couldn't believe that there was someone in our house laughing and smiling when my daughter was laying me in god we took her to bed we had a um bassinet kind of a um like a snugglebee pillow and we laid her in that and we put it inside our beds with us instead of into the um co-sleeper we put it in our beds and she slept with us that night it was probably the last good sleep that i would have i had my hand on her cheeks the whole night and i didn't wake up until about seven i got her dressed um it was really hard to choose an outfit because i loved dressing my baby girl every morning around 10 o'clock in the morning um we would get her dress for the day and she was so good she never fussed um on the change mat maybe once or twice in her entire life and we're on that change meant a lot and i always like to think that maybe she enjoyed it as much as i did but i just couldn't imagine choosing an outfit that she would be in forever she would never even get to choose another outfit we picked some white stockings in a white jamie k long sleeve onesie to keep her warm she has on some little white booties to keep her feet more i don't have any other shoes for her she was too little and so just the white booties and then she has a beautiful soft green and white dress and matching bow and she's wearing um a jamie k dress and bow and she looked beautiful i still wish every day that i could change her outfit and so i lay out an outfit for her every morning something new for her to wear based on the weather and i try to imagine her wearing them people came in and out of the house and at one point a baby came in and i didn't know how to feel because i knew they weren't my baby and so i asked her to bring this little boy closer and she did and as i held my gnarly i put my hand on this little baby who i was making noises and wriggling around and i tried to imagine that it was noah that noah was making those noises and then noah was moving eventually we had to take her to the mid-eye um there were lots of lots of there were lots of cultural things that had to happen there we had to be welcomed onto the land we had to listen to um speeches and i felt really out of control at that point and i just wanted to look and now and keep her in my arms and i wasn't supposed to touch her once she'd been laid down but i but i didn't want to do that i want to tell my baby so i did and you're supposed to greet everyone as they come in and i wasn't okay to do that i wasn't okay to say hello to people to look at people to thank people so i just looked at noah i just stared at her from the moment that we got in them and i until the moment that she had to leave i just looked at her i remember that night i was laying next to her to go to sleep and she was in who snuggled me in my kit and snuggled me pillow and she was starting to smell and i still had that thought that i just wanted to hurry up i wanted to put her in the ground and so that i didn't have to see my baby like that so the next morning is where we had the ceremony before we um walked gnarly over to the cemetery and lowered her into the ground at that point she was inside we didn't have her in a coffin we had her in a flax basket which was then put inside a beautiful wooden chest so i never saw her at the cemetery and even saw my baby's face and they put their box in the ground and i know that she was in it but i never saw her there so every day when i go to villa grave i really struggle to imagine her there because i never saw it and if she was here we would have no reason to be there i think ever since she left everything is messing with my brain because i don't want to accept that she's gone but everything around me tells me that she is the fact that she's not in my arms the fact that i'm not making milk the fact that her clothes aren't getting worn i'm doing no baby washing i don't have any space for anyone else in my heart anymore i don't have room to care for anyone else i don't have room to think about your feelings i'm just doing it for me empanada i don't know if i'll be here in a week in a month some days are just constant numbing pain and then other days it spikes and i just can't possibly be here without her one day the pain might be stronger than the fear but i i don't know i need everyone to remember her i need everyone to know how important she is i want everyone in the whole wide world to know that my daughter's gone and to feel that pain and if you manage to listen to all of this thank you thank you for spending this time hopefully thinking about my baby girl

Channel: Judea Arthur

Views: 2,793,905

Rating: 4.9548955 out of 5

Keywords: @infantloss, @SIDS, @suddeninfantdeathsyndrome

Id: nddMfGmvakQ

Length: 35min 23sec (2123 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 20 2021

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Warning: Incredibly sad.