Felix Ambrose was born 10 weeks early and spent nearly two months in a special care baby unit. His father, Stephen, documented the experience with a camera, while his mother, Laura, tells the story behind the pictures
The first time I saw Felix he was 21 hours old. He was wearing a blue woolly hat, and attached to endless machines. It's not how babies usually look when they meet their mothers; and it's certainly not how any mother wants to see her child.
My first thought was how vulnerable he looked. Inside me he'd seemed safe, buffered ... but the truth was that my womb wasn't a safe place for Felix.
The first sign I had that things weren't right was as I was lying in bed with my older child, Freya, who was three. I felt a trickle run down my leg, felt down under the bedclothes, and found blood. I went to the loo ? and the blood just gushed out. My mum came over and took me straight to hospital: on the ultrasound scan, soon after we arrived, the baby's heartbeat looked fine ? and then we all saw what looked like smoke billowing from my placenta. I was having a placental abruption: unless they got the baby out fast, they said, we would both die.
As soon as he was born, Felix was whisked away. He was put on a ventilator and given morphine and antibiotics; I couldn't cuddle or even touch him. Meanwhile, on the ward, I was surrounded by the sounds of other mothers with their full-term babies, and saw their balloons and presents and cards. I couldn't help being jealous, wishing it was us. They were celebrating ? our baby's arrival had been all about anxiety and fear.
Felix was tiny compared with full-term babies, but Stephen and I decided to give him Titan as a middle name. It means a person of strength and size, so the name felt like a vote of confidence in him because although he was so small, Felix was really strong ... a fighter, that's what we believed. We knew he'd pull through and learn to suck; to regulate his body temperature and grow, all the things babies have to do before they can go home.
What I didn't know was that it would be two more weeks until I could cuddle him. Right after giving birth I got a cold sore and the staff said I couldn't touch him, that the herpes infection could be dangerous for him.
The day a nurse put him into my arms for the first time was a huge turning-point: until then it had felt like I was looking at a baby in a box. Holding him made the emotional, visceral connection that said: this child is mine.
Breastfeeding was tricky: it always is with a premature baby. It's long and it's lonely: long because it takes ages for the baby to get the strength and the know-how, lonely because you have to spend many hours on your own with a breast pump, keeping the milk going for the moment when the baby can suck for himself, and collecting milk so the staff can feed him by tube. It was 17 days before we had our first good feed. That felt wonderful ? like every mother in the unit, I knew that the key to taking my baby home was the moment he'd be able to suck and put on weight. So that felt like a milestone.
Until day 23, Felix seemed to be on a straight trajectory ? then he got a chest infection and developed breathing problems. He needed oxygen, and they took him off my milk and put him back on a drip. We had come so far and now, suddenly, everything seemed to be going backwards.
I kept asking if I could hold Felix, but the staff were reluctant ? they said he needed to rest. Yet I didn't feel that me holding him stopped him resting ? in fact, the machines showed that the amount of oxygen in his blood went up when he was in my arms. It's very hard to have someone else tell you what you can and can't do to your own child. If I could have held Felix, he'd have felt better and so would I.
By the 45th day, Felix had fought off the infection, but there were more worries over his weight. They decided to fortify my milk with extra calories, and that seemed to do the trick because he gained an astonishing five ounces in three days. At last, I could see light at the end of the tunnel: he was getting bigger, he was getting stronger, he was feeding well, the oxygen in his blood was steady and he was nearly ready to come home to start his real life.
By this stage, what I most longed for was ordinary days. I was desperate for this strange life to end, this life of organising every day around two or three trips to a hospital ward. Those ordinary days have arrived because we've brought Felix home. I can't tell you how much I appreciate them.
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