Charlotte King should have still been pregnant this Mother’s Day, looking forward to the arrival of her twin boys in May.
Instead, she is grieving for Leo, the baby boy she lost seven weeks ago, while spending every moment possible in the high dependency unit of North Tees Hospital with his twin brother, Oska, who is doing everything he can to make his mum feel better.
“He’s putting on weight really well, he has started to breastfeed and graduated from intensive care last week, so I couldn’t ask him to be doing any more,” says the 26-year-old, who also has a three-year-old son, Dax, with partner, Simon Feasey, 29.
It was on New Year’s Day when Charlotte, who lives in Yarm, realised something was wrong.
“I woke up thinking ‘why is the bed wet?’,” she says. “I came into hospital and they found I’d lost all the water around one of the babies. They weren’t identical twins, so they each had their own sack. I was only 21 weeks pregnant and I was terrified.” Doctors told Charlotte she had an infection which had probably caused one of the sacks to rupture.
“They said there was an 80% chance I would go into labour, but I didn’t, so they said we could go home.”
For the next three weeks, Charlotte spent her time resting, drinking water and eating as healthily as she could, while taking her temperature every four hours and coming into hospital for regular tests and scans.
“I’d been really healthy throughout the pregnancy, but I thought if I could just up my game...” Charlotte says. “We had three weeks of scans where both heartbeats were good. Then I had a scan on a Thursday and we found out there was no water around Leo. It was devastating. I kept thinking ‘how is he going to manage?’
“The midwives were trying to be positive, saying some babies can go on like that for weeks, but Leo didn’t. I went into labour on the Sunday.”
Thankfully Charlotte had called Simon, who is a submariner in the Navy and based in Plymouth, to say he needed to come home. “I don’t know what I would have done if we hadn’t been able to go through it together.”
Leo was born on Monday, January 19 at just 24 weeks and three days.
“I think I only pushed three times and there he was,” she says. “He was rushed straight to intensive care.
“There would have been a chance - albeit a very low one - of survival had he had his waters. They did everything they could. He was just too poorly.”
Tragically, Leo lived for just four hours.
“When they said we could come up to see him, that was the first and last time I saw him properly. I got him out of the incubator and he was left with us - me, Simon and my mum. We all got a chance to say goodbye and I held him while he went.
“Everyone here was so respectful of us and of Leo, allowing us to have that time together and have those moments as a family. I’ll always be grateful for that, and for the photos they took for us. At the time, we couldn’t have taken any, we were too distraught. But they knew how treasured those photos would be.”
Still pregnant with Leo’s twin brother, Charlotte was kept in hospital and placed on strict bed rest in the hope that he would stay where he was for as long as possible to give him the best chance.
“They were born at the same time of the evening, four days apart. It was strange being pregnant for those four days,” says Charlotte. “Leo hadn’t made a sound when he came out. Oska gave out an almighty cry when he was born. It was like he was saying: ‘I’m here!’”
Although the family were able to take comfort in the “honeymoon period” for a couple of days after his arrival, it wasn’t long before Oska, who weighed in at just 1lb 15oz, had the first of many fights on his hands. He had an enlarged PDA - a valve in the heart which normally closes when babies are born; he suffered a bleed on the brain, which is common with pre-term babies; and then he got pneumonia.
“We were told he probably wasn’t going to make it,” says Charlotte. “We were at a point when they said the ventilation he had to be on to keep him alive also had a chance of killing him. How on earth do you deal with that?”
Thankfully for Charlotte, Simon, Dax and their wider family, who Charlotte says have been amazing throughout, Oska, who has Leo as a middle name, has come through everything life has thrown at him. “He’s our little fighter,” says Charlotte, who is looking forward to Simon coming home on leave next month.
“He won’t be able to believe how much Oska has come on. Of course there’s still a long way to go and we won’t know the effects of everything he has been through until he comes home and starts to develop, but at the moment, we’re just thankful for every day and for everything which has kept him with us.”
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