5 days old

Hello

My name's Jenni Maltby and I am telling you the story of the bravest, strongest and most beautiful baby girl you will ever meet,  Her name is Holly Grace Maltby. My Daughter.

I am writing this Blog to keep family and friends updated on the progress of our beautiful baby girl.

I am also writing this to help keep my mind busy in an attempt to stay sane and in case some one else in the same situation needs to know that there are others out there going through the same heart ache and need to know that they are not alone......

10 days ago, on Tuesday 15th November 2011, at 24 weeks pregnant I went into premature labour. We realised there was something wrong when I felt a pressure "down there", so my husband, Matt, and I looked and sure enough there was something coming out of me right there on the bedroom floor. Matt rushed me to the hospital (which luckily is only a mile away) and once we had got there what ever we had seen coming out had gone back in. The doctor came to examine me and told me I was 9cm dilated and that my baby would arrive pretty immanently.
The doctors decision was to keep Holly inside me for as long as humanly possible, to ignore the contractions I was having (which were in my back - I thought I had just got a bad back all day!) and hold onto her. Holly was only 24 weeks and not due to be born for another 16 weeks so her lungs in particular were not equip to deal with life outside of my tummy so the doctors gave me steroid injections to help develop her lungs to give her a better chance of survival when she was born. The problem was that they had to be in my system for 24hrs in order for them to work, so it was matter of counting the hours that went by, every hour was one step closer to her survival.

The hours went by and soon it was the next morning, after a night of contractions and no sleep I was exhausted, as was Matt who hadn't left my side for a second. The doctors came to examine me again and told me I had gone down to 3cm dilated, which was fantastic news, it meant we could buy some more time to let the steroids work and give Holly an even better chance of survival. The major problem now was that the hospital we were in were not equip to deal with babies as premature as Holly, they only look after babies born after 32 weeks gestation, a long 8 weeks away from where we were! so they were trying to find not just Holly, but me AND Holly a bed at another hospital. They wanted Holly to be inside me when they transported her as it was less risky for her that way, but that meant who ever took us in had to have room for me too. There were talks of going all the way to Liverpool, but God only knew if Holly would hang on that long and Heartlands Hospital in Birmingham were our next option, they had a bed for Holly and it was just a matter of waiting until they had a bed free for me and hoping that Holly would hold on. Mum and dad have a friend at Heartlands, a consultant obstetrician, so they phoned her to see if there was anything she could do and with in what seemed liked minutes we had a call back saying she had got us both a bed. It felt like a miracle that some where could take Holly and me and that we could get her safely there inside my tummy.... except by now I was 4 cm dilated and Holly was trying to come down and be born. The ambulance arrived to take me to Heartlands and that was the longest 40 minutes of my life. I was sure that iIwas going to give birth in the ambulance and that no one would be there to save Holly. but thank God she hold on inside my tummy.

We arrived somewhere between 1pm and 3pm on Wednesday afternoon, I'm not sure exactly of the time, it was all a blur, and we were taken straight into the labour unit where I was then told I had an infection and needed to have antibiotics by drip to bring my temperature down and get rid of the infection so that it didn't affect Holly inside me. Again began the waiting game. Keep her inside as long as you can. I had had no pain relief as it might have made Holly drowsy when she came out, and was still getting contractions, sometimes every 2 minutes, sometimes every 6 minutes, sometimes not for 15 minutes, but Holly was really trying to come out and see the world. this went on until Friday afternoon (3 whole days after we had originally gone into hospital - every day that passed meant that there was 2% more chance that Holly would survive) and the doctors finally decided it was too risky to keep her in due to my infection and put me on another drip to increase my contractions and get her out.

At 6:41pm on Friday 18th November, Holly Grace Maltby was born. 15 weeks and 4 days early. weighing a tiny 1 lb 10 oz.

Holly holding my finger whilst she sleeps.