Three years, six months, six days: How Red Nose helped this mum rebuild after loss
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On Red Nose Day, Canberra mum Dimity Blundell shares the tragic loss of her son and how Red Nose helped her rebuild after the loss.
When I was 26 and my baby died, I honestly thought that was the end of the world. I couldn’t possibly fathom a life beyond that, a life after loss. But as we all know, life does go on. The sun relentlessly rises every day, even when we don’t want it to. I like to think of my life now in two parts: the life before, and the life after. Even now, three years, six months and six days later, it still hurts to look at photos from the before. The girl in those photos has no idea what’s coming.
Today is Red Nose Day. A day where we come together and get silly for a serious cause, to stop little lives from being cut short. I didn’t know much about Red Nose before they became my lifeline. I didn’t know that we have a small but fierce Canberra community. I didn’t know that Red Nose provided free services for families like mine. I didn’t know that Red Nose would be the driving force in putting my life back together and finding a voice in a space that no one wants to talk about.
I was 35 weeks pregnant when my cat, Ollie, woke me at 11:03 pm on the 21st of February 2022. At that point, I didn’t know anything was wrong, but Ollie did. It’s funny how animals can pick up on these things. It still bothers me that the worst moment of my life happened to me in my home. It was meant to be a safe space, and very quickly, it became a horror scene when I started haemorrhaging litres of blood in my bathroom.
Such was the little we knew about pregnancy complications; my husband Michael and I didn’t immediately call an ambulance. Instead, we called birth suite, as we had been instructed at every point throughout my pregnancy. Never for one moment did I think that this was bad. Naivety, I know.
By 12:16 am on the 22nd of February 2022, a Category A emergency caesarean was called. By 12:17 am the anaesthetic had been administered; at 12:18 am I turned to the midwife holding my hand, took off my oxygen mask and told her “His name is Finley”. At 12:19 am surgery commenced, and at 12:20 am on the 22nd of February 2022, my son, Finley Howard Blundell was born. Finley was born with an APGAR score of 0,0,0. He was gone before he arrived, and was declared dead at 12:24 am, 22/2/22. It was the wildest four minutes of my life, four minutes that I wasn’t really a part of.
Finley’s death was the result of (and this is the actual medical terminology on my medical file, I’m not being dramatic here) ‘a complete and catastrophic placental abruption.’ If you, like pre-2022 Dimi, have no idea what this is, it’s when the placenta detaches from the wall of the uterus prior to birth.
For reasons we’ll probably never know, my placenta completely came away from the wall of my uterus, cutting off Finley’s oxygen supply and causing extreme blood loss. We didn’t meet any of the risk criteria: over 40 or under 16, consumption of drugs and alcohol, being a smoker, or extreme blunt force trauma (like being hit directly in the stomach by a car going full speed.) I was asleep, I was 26, this was my first pregnancy, I was healthy and fit. I’m still angry at the universe this happened to us. Whoever is waiting on the other side, whatever divine entity, will have to answer to the bereaved mother.
During Finley’s pregnancy, I had been made redundant from my job, and my husband worked in early childhood, an industry we know doesn’t pay much. Basically, we had no money. I vividly remember sitting in my hospital bed, holding my son, and saying to Michael, “I have no idea how we’re going to get through this.”
Therapy is expensive, and I didn’t even know if there was therapy for people whose baby died. It felt like such an unreachable niche. This is where Red Nose came into our story. We were referred to them through our hospital social worker. I remember that intake call and saying to the person on the phone, “I don’t have any money, how much is this going to cost?” And it was then that I was told that Red Nose provides all its services – counselling, its peer-to-peer 24/7 support line, peer support groups, online groups, vital research, safe sleep advice, and so many others – free of cost, through the generosity of donations. Red Nose Day provides a huge chunk of those funds.
For the next several months, Michael and I would fill the 9 am slot every other Monday at the Red Nose office in Chifley. I can’t tell you how much those counselling sessions meant to us. I’d never really known anyone who had lost a baby, and so when I sat down across from our counsellor (who shared that she had also lost her baby, a daughter, in 2013) she was living proof that this did happen, it happened to normal people like us, and that one day, we would be okay. That woman gave me courage to know that one day I could use my pain, like she was doing, to make a difference in the lives of those who came after me.
Red Nose wasn’t just about counselling sessions for us. It became a part of who we are in this post-loss life, and it gave me courage to start speaking about the uncomfortable. Brene Brown once said “One day you will tell your story of how you overcame what you went through, and it will become someone else’s survival guide.” This is what Red Nose means to me.
Dimity and her family.
I remember one of the first in-person support groups we attended. It was just Michael and I, and two other mums. We learnt that one of those babies had been born six days after Finley, and they were two of six babies stillborn in the ACT that week. The other mum there shared about how, after her caesarean, she found herself seeking some kind of normalcy in her life, and subsequently, was cleaning her house following the influx of visitors who stream through when your baby dies.
We laughed through tears, bonding over the fact that I found myself doing the exact same thing at 10 days post-surgery, being annoyed that my house didn’t feel like my house. It was such a small moment, so minor in comparison to our grief, but it brought us together. It’s moments like those I hold onto when I look at other families and know that mine will never look like theirs, knowing it will never be whole. I remember that mum, cleaning her house, and know that I’m not alone in this pain and the insanities that come with it.
In Australia, we’re losing over 3,000 babies every year. That’s higher than the national road toll. In the ACT, that equates to two babies a week. And that’s not just two babies. That’s two families, two lots of communities, friends, schools, colleagues. The loss of the baby isn’t isolated to just the family. It goes so much further. We need funding from days like Red Nose Day to not only support our families, but to fund vital research into saving little lives. We don’t know what caused Finley’s death, or over two thirds of stillbirths. But maybe in 50 years’ time, when my children’s children are having their own babies, the prevention for placental abruptions will be a simple thing. We might never know. For now, we will share Finley’s name and his little story, the love of his big sister, the journey that brought us his little brother. And that is enough.
If you’d like to donate to Red Nose Day in honour of Finley, or any other babies you know who never came home, please do so here at his Red Nose Day fundraising page.
Love,
Finley’s Mum
Photography: Heartfelt/Kayleigh McGlynn.
