This is dedicated to the Dads who understand this feeling.
My Loss part 2.
For part 1 see Thomas Portlock.
This is the second child loss that I have had to suffer through and it was no easier than the first in fact it was worse.
After the loss of Thomas my first born we had a daughter named Margaret, and then we became pregnant again with another son who we named David. My heart was filled with joy at the prospect of finally having a son. As we had already lost one child we kept an eye on everything, it was all going so well until that fateful night when my world came crashing down again. My partner was giving Margaret a bath when she slipped and hit her stomach on the edge of the bath. When I heard this had happened I raced her to Noarlunga Hospital where they placed her on the neonatal monitor.
The Nurses checked her out and said baby and Mom are both doing fine and I felt the dread leaving my body, we went home feeling so relieved and slept soundly. We awoke the next morning and my partner said she hadn’t felt David move all night so we raced back to the hospital and they connected her to the monitor but couldn’t find a heart beat the Nurse just looked at us and said they would need to do an ultrasound. Meanwhile my mind is going around and around at a thousand miles an hour and I was thinking oh no here we go again. They do the ultrasound and the Nurse says I need to get a Doctor to look at this.
The Doctor looks at the ultrasound and turned to us and says sorry your baby is dead. It suddenly felt to me that the whole world had just exploded and left me standing not being able to do a thing. He then said we would have to go to Flinders so David could be delivered, As I couldn’t go in the Ambulance I had to ring my best friend for a lift and his first words to me were this is not a funny joke to which I replied do you hear me laughing?
We arrived at Flinders where the Maternity staff met us and couldn’t believe that we had lost a second child, I felt so bad for my partner having to go through childbirth delivering a stillborn baby. When David was born the silence was deafening the Nurses then took David away so they could clean him up and take some photos for us. We spent some time with David and all I could think about was having to go through all this crap again. We also had Nurses from the Neonatal Unit come in as they all remembered us from Thomas’s death. We managed to get everything organised and finished and the last thing we had to do was bury David. We hit a major snag when we filled out the application we found out because he didn’t have my last name as he was stillborn.
When we spoke to the Centennial Park Cemetery Staff to arrange a plot and they realised we already had a son buried there they looked up Thomas’s plot and turned to us and smiled I was thinking what the hell, when the lady says the plot next to Thomas is empty and we can have the two brothers together. My response was to burst out in tears and to this day both my boys keep each other company.
R.I.P my boys Daddy loves you for ever
Written by Mark Portlock, Thomas and David’s Father.
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