Authors: Anna Kennedy
Sean had been sharing in a boys’ bedsit, so he had to smuggle me in to his room, where we shared a single bed. Considering Sean weighed 18 stone, it was cramped but fun, and I had to hide my clothes so the cleaners wouldn’t find them.
Moving in with Sean was a scary experience for me, bearing in mind my complete inexperience with boys, but things went quite well and, after a time, I found work, first in a Woolworth’s store, which I hated, then at Sanderson’s, a textiles manufacturer, as a supervisor in the orders office, where my language skills came in handy. I even managed to get my dance classes up and running again. Meanwhile, Sean, who was studying biochemistry during the day, found night work in a nearby Tesco supermarket to help make ends meet.
My move south to London angered Dad so much that he wouldn’t speak to me for six months and even my sister wasn’t best pleased with me for leaving her behind. Mum, apparently, had cried when she found out I had gone. Because I hadn’t the heart to tell her I’d moved in with Sean, I told her I was sharing a bedsit with four other girls. The trouble with lying is that you need to remember what you tell someone, and this cover story meant I had to make up and remember the names I’d made up for my imaginary friends whenever I spoke to Mum.
It wasn’t the best way to start a relationship, but Sean and I were happy together and, without telling our families, we married at Uxbridge Register Office in front of two witnesses we didn’t know on 24 September 1986. We moved out of the bedsit into married quarters at Brunel University and, not long
afterwards, moved again, this time into a shared-ownership house in Uxbridge. It may have had only one bedroom, but we were so excited when we moved in.
Then, in 1989, I fell pregnant. We were delighted. This was meant to be the start of a wonderful experience for us both, but little did we anticipate the heartache and traumas ahead of us that would have such a devastating effect on our family.
I had always hoped to have my first child before I reached the age of 30, but I endured a really bad pregnancy. I suffered from pre-eclampsia which, basically, meant my ankles became swollen and I had problems with my kidneys, which resulted in proteins leaving my body via my urine. It is an extremely dangerous condition for both the mother and her unborn child. There were fears that there could be deadly complications, one of the main concerns being my high blood pressure.
Toxaemia, which indicates toxins in the blood, was also diagnosed. My body was giving up on me and I knew I was really ill. It was really scary. For the first 12 weeks I couldn’t stop vomiting, which meant I couldn’t go to work. I thought, If this is pregnancy, you can keep it!
After a while, though, the vomiting became less frequent and I was able to return to my work at Sanderson’s but, within weeks, my feet had swollen up like balloons. When I was 25 weeks’ pregnant I was getting severe headaches and silver dots began appearing before my eyes. My colleagues were telling me that I didn’t look well and that I should visit my doctor. I made an appointment but found I couldn’t even get my shoes on.
After checking me over, my doctor wouldn’t even let me get off the chair. She tested my urine and discovered that the sample
contained three plusses of protein, which put my baby and me firmly in the danger zone, and my blood pressure was through the roof. She immediately telephoned for an ambulance.
I was taken to Hillingdon Hospital and there I remained for weeks and weeks in the maternity ward. It had been decided that I needed bed rest to bring my blood pressure down and I was placed in a room next door to the nurses’ station because I could be more closely observed through a window in the dividing wall.
Despite all the care and attention I had been receiving and weeks of bed rest, at 28 weeks my blood pressure went through the roof again and, because the special-care baby unit did not have a suitable cot and the doctors had decided I might need to have an emergency Caesarean operation, the hunt was on for a hospital that could not only deliver my baby but would have a specialist cot to accommodate him or her after the birth.
When I was informed that the nearest hospital to meet these requirements was in Brighton, I panicked. I didn’t want to go there. After all, there was no way Sean would have been able to get there and I really wanted him to be with me when our baby was born. The doctors and nurses tried to reassure me. If, they told me, my blood pressure could be reduced, I could stay where I was. Nurses came in to help me with relaxation exercises and, thankfully, my blood pressure responded accordingly.
Two weeks later, on 5 January 1990, a nurse came in and told me I would be OK to go on for another day. ‘The longer you keep the baby in there, the better.’ The next thing I knew, I was surrounded by medics telling me they needed to get the baby out straightaway after they had studied the results of some
medical tests. I was to have an emergency Caesarean operation. There was just enough time to telephone Sean before I was put under a general anaesthetic.
For the next 48 hours I had to have a nurse by my side. My kidneys were packing up and I was continually being sick owing to an allergic reaction to the anaesthetic. When I came round, Sean was sitting next to me, stroking my hand, but because our son Patrick was so small, he had already been taken to the special-care baby unit.
Normally, under these circumstances, a picture is taken of the newborn baby to show the mother when she wakes up but, unfortunately, the camera was broken so all I knew about Patrick was what Sean had told me. ‘He’s really lovely,’ he said, before explaining that Patrick was receiving special care owing to the fact that he weighed just 2 pounds 10 ounces (about 1.3 kilos). He also had pre-eclampsia and his body, like mine, had been filling with fluid. When it was drained from him, his weight dropped further to 2 pounds 4 ounces (just over a kilo).
It wasn’t until Patrick was four days old that I was taken down to see him for the first time. There were lots of tubes and wires attached to him and, when I first saw him, I broke down and cried because it was so scary seeing him like that. He was such a tiny little thing, lying there with an oxygen box to help him breathe, and feet so small that the only way the nurses had found to keep his socks on was to tape them round his ankles to stop the skin rubbing off, because he was moving his legs around so much. From this point on I saw Patrick every day. Having our own child was exhilarating but scary at the same time, since we had little idea of whether he would survive or not.
I was kept in hospital for ten days after the birth. Bearing in mind all the stress I had been under, I was less than impressed as I walked through our front door. The house looked as though a bomb had hit it. There were piles of washing up and it was obvious Sean had not been coping at all with living alone. I ended up picking things up from the floor and, to be honest, I was fuming.
Each day afterwards I was taken to visit Patrick in the hospital by a voluntary helper since, because I’d had a Caesarean operation, I was not permitted to drive. Sean found fatherhood rather scary. He’s such a big bloke and, of course, Patrick was so, so tiny. In fact we have a photograph of Sean holding Patrick and Sean’s thumb is as big as Patrick’s head.
Patrick’s health gave us and the medics plenty of cause for concern. He wasn’t responding well to treatment or tolerating his feeds and he became very seriously ill. Sean and I were informed that, unless Patrick had a successful blood transfusion, we might lose him. To say we were desperate and scared would probably be an understatement and I found myself praying all the time – the Hail Mary, one of my favourite prayers. Things became so serious that Sean and I agreed we would ask the hospital’s Catholic priest to come to Patrick to baptise him and to administer the Last Rites. Patrick was given two sacraments. The first allowed him to be baptised and this allowed him to receive a further sacrament, the sacrament of the sick.
The decision to ask for the sacrament of the sick was born out of pure desperation. Patrick was, indeed, extremely ill. A successful blood transfusion was his only hope of survival. Thank God for people who so kindly give their blood! Had it
not been for people like that, Patrick would not be with us today. Sean and I were overjoyed that he responded so well to the blood transfusion – in fact, he looked like a little tomato afterwards and, a couple of days later, his tolerance to feeds improved, he gained weight and became stronger and stronger.
However, there were still a few scares along the way, not least when workmen outside the hospital accidentally cut through an electricity cable and the emergency generator failed to kick in. As a result there were nurses running around the special-care baby unit, frantically handing out blankets for the babies and operating bellows-like equipment to help some of them breathe. Thankfully, after 20 minutes or so, the power supply was restored.
Patrick didn’t get the all-clear until he was ten weeks old. We were on cloud nine when we were at last told we could bring him home, but we soon discovered life would be far from straightforward. For a start, sleeping was a problem. Having been in the special-care baby unit for the first ten weeks of his life, Patrick had become used to all the beeping noises of the equipment that had helped him to survive. At home, he began to make strange growling noises as he slept and, after a while, it was driving Sean and me round the bend. What was going on?
I telephoned the midwife, who came round to reassure us that Patrick was probably only compensating for the noises he had got used to hearing while lying in his incubator. She suggested we get a clock, wrap it in a towel and lay it next to Patrick as he slept. Thank God it worked!
After Patrick had been home for ten days, Sean’s mother Coral came to stay and to offer support. That day, we put
Patrick down for a sleep but, after a while, I became concerned, particularly since he hadn’t woken up as normal for a feed. When I went over to Patrick, my concerns were raised because he looked so very pale. I called Coral in to have a look at him.
Being a nurse, Coral knew instantly something was not right and noticed that Patrick was blue around the mouth. I telephoned our doctor, who suggested I make an appointment to bring him in, but Coral disagreed. ‘We’ve got to get this baby to hospital right now!’ she insisted. As I picked Patrick up he was limp and his head just flopped right back. We rushed outside and I handed him over to Coral, who, by now, was sitting in the back of our car.
I have to say, I drove like a lunatic en route to the hospital, mounting pavements and jumping red traffic lights and, on arrival, I just abandoned the car in the middle of the car park. I grabbed hold of Patrick and ran as fast as I could into the hospital. ‘Someone’s got to look at this baby right now!’ I yelled and, fortunately, right in front of me, a consultant appeared who had tended to Patrick and me while we had been in hospital a few days earlier.
‘Whatever’s the matter?’ he asked. He laid Patrick in his arms with his feet towards his chest and his head in his hands. Then he raised and lowered his arms. ‘Come on, Patrick,’ he said before slowly repeating the movement. By now I was frantic and holding tightly onto Coral’s arm, but the consultant remained calm and raised and lowered his arms once more, at which point Patrick took a huge intake of breath. What a relief!
Patrick was treated for septicaemia and given a lumbar puncture – and it was a worrying 24 hours waiting for the
results. He was diagnosed as suffering from apnoea, also known as sleep apnoea, a breathing-related sleep disorder that can cause the sufferer to stop breathing up to 400 times during the night. We were concerned to learn it was a potentially
life-threatening
condition but glad it had been diagnosed early as, untreated, it can be associated with heart attacks and strokes.
Patrick was kept in hospital for ten days. After such a scare I was afraid to take my eyes off him even for a moment, and I often had to pinch his earlobes to wake him up in order to remind him to breathe again. Thankfully, though, we were told he would eventually outgrow the condition.
Nevertheless, for the first three years of his life, Patrick was a sickly child and had to be given so many injections for his various ailments that he began to look like a junkie. Among the setbacks he encountered were a number of chest infections, glue ear, throat infections, vitamin D deficiency, severe croup, whooping cough and a disorder known as rickets, which causes poor development of the bones. I felt we could have had a permanent room at the hospital, since we seemed to be returning there on such a frequent basis. Sean and I often had to give Patrick nebulisers because it seemed he would pick up any bug that was going around at the time.
Because Sean was now working as a proofreader for Middlesex County Press, much of the day-to-day caring for Patrick was down to me and I would often find myself spending the night at the hospital while Patrick was being treated for one thing or another.
When he was two years old we all moved to nearby Acton because our one-bedroom home was no longer big enough for
the three of us. Again, we purchased a shared-ownership home, but this time we had an extra bedroom and a garden. Not only that, the lady living next door was a childminder, which allowed me to return to work and, fortunately, despite my prolonged absences, Sanderson’s had kept my job open for me.
Our neighbour got on really well with Patrick and, after working as his childminder for a while, soon got to know a lot about him. Patrick would play with her little daughter but, one day when I went to collect him, she told me that she had noticed Patrick playing inappropriately with the toys. For instance, rather than running a toy car along the floor like most children would, Patrick would turn it upside down and just spin the wheels with his fingers. Meanwhile he’d learned the alphabet really quickly and even knew it backwards.
One day, while sitting in the doctor’s surgery with Patrick, I noticed other patients listening as he recited a
Thomas
the Tank
Engine
story, word perfect, from memory. He was only three years old at the time and he was just staring at the wall with no book in sight. What the other patients didn’t realise was that, by now, Patrick had memorised all 25 of his
Thomas the Tank
Engine
stories – each one word-perfect. Sean and I were convinced we had a little Einstein on our hands!