This week, I’m handing the blog over to the lovely Hannah who runs Hannah Brooke Photography. Hannah has written a great (and harrowing) article about why you should trust your instincts!

This is a blog I wrote back in 2016; in fact, it was the first blog post I ever wrote! I wrote it because my daughter contracted Bacterial Meningitis at just five weeks old and I needed to talk about it because, up until that point, it was just something that happened to distant, far away people in the news. It wasn’t something that was ever going to happen to me …..or so I thought!

2016

Becoming a parent for the first time was overwhelming, a heady mix of feeling madly in love and being completely unqualified for this new job. My biggest fear as I cradled my first born back in the summer of 2014 was how I’d be able to tell if he got ill? “You just will, he’ll let you know” a friend said. I was lucky in that my fears were unfounded and my son has never really got ill so far apart from the odd sniffle and one short lived tummy bug.

So when my baby girl arrived in May 2016, I felt waaaay more relaxed about the baby bit. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy second time round. What had I worried about so much the first time?

And then she got ill. But she didn’t “let me know” as in she didn’t cry, which has been my basic approach to parenting this far (if they’re not crying, they’re ok!)

She didn’t do anything really, just went very pale and still, stopped feeding and the little bits of milk she did drink came straight back up. On the morning of the day I took her to the doctors, I was supposed to be taking my two year old to a playgroup as I felt guilty about not giving him as much attention as he’d been used to. I could have SO easily ‘given it another 24 hours and see if she starts feeding a bit better’….but I trotted off to the docs, fully expecting to be sent back home feeling like a neurotic mummy. But I wasn’t. We got sent to the hospital. Where she underwent several blood tests, a chest x-ray, a lumbar puncture and was finally diagnosed with Bacterial Meningitis. Sorry, what? She didn’t even have a temperature!

Ironically, a really close friend of mine went through the same thing in 2014 when her baby was seven weeks old, so I should really have been much more aware of it but I just didn’t think it would be something that would ever actually happen to us! So wrong! I didn’t know paleness was a symptom! Did you?

Now I KNOW there are people who deal with much, much worse, and I have the utmost respect for those people, but this was MY baby and it felt like my world had just stopped turning. I wasn’t sure how someone so tiny could fight it. I wasn’t sure if she’d have long lasting effects like brain damage or loss of limbs. It was terrifying.

Thankfully, we caught it really early and the antibiotics helped her to show quick signs of recovery. I won’t bore you with the details but two weeks in hospital was tough going. Sleep deprivation, crap food, hospital noise, the worry, and of course, a humongous dollop of GUILT over the fact I was there with my baby and not at home with my two year old, who was old enough to know I wasn’t there and to be missing his mummy. We finally got discharged and settled back in to normal life. She started smiling and hitting all of her milestones, and everyone around us breathed a collective sigh of relief. We could rest easy and just get on with things.

Except I felt like I had a bit of PTSD; it would hit me from nowhere, like a ton of bricks right into the pit of my stomach. “My baby could have DIED.” “What if I hadn’t noticed the paleness”: “what if I’d left it 24/48 more hours before seeking help.” It still doesn’t bear thinking about. At the time it felt like completely irrational thinking, because she was here and she was ok, but it would catch me off guard and take my breath away for a long time.

She was always completely none the wiser of course. She won’t remember the lumbar puncture, the general anesthetic, the operation, the blood tests, the x-ray. But I’ll never forgot how it felt handing my six week old baby over to that anesthetist and being told to go wait elsewhere for two hours.

Absolutely. Bloody. Petrifying.

People congratulated me on my parenting instinct and for spotting it early. But I didn’t. I knew there was something wrong but I never in a million years expected it to be meningitis. I thought the signs and symptoms were a temperature and a rash. The rash is one of the last symptoms to develop and usually means that septicemia has set in….which is very, very bad news. Never, ever wait for a rash to appear.

2019

My daughter is three and a half now. You would never know a single thing had been wrong with her. She’s a joy to have around (well… 90% of the time, like any normal threenager!) As a baby, she was a little slower to hit some of her milestones, which raised some concerns with her Health Visitors, but she’d been through such a lot! She was just a little slower to get moving, and I for one, was not rushing her.

Now? She wakes up happy every day. She has a cracking little sense of humour and she’s absolutely full of sass. She is selective in her friendships and doesn’t take any hassle of some of the ‘stronger characters’ at nursery. Physically, she’s amazing! She recently started swimming lessons after 18 months of sitting on the side and watching her big bro. By lesson four, she had ditched the armbands completely.

It’s stopped hitting me like it used to, but it’s still a story I think is important to share. I didn’t know all the signs and symptoms of meningitis, but I do feel genuinely lucky that I listened to my gut instinct and took her to that doctor that day. And overall, I’m really grateful to the wonderful NHS for looking after her so well, and nursing her back to health.

Instinct and why you should trust it .....