'Although we now have Leo, we'll never forget our first baby'

Tommy's guest blog, Kirsty  12/10/2107

We got married in September 2014, we bought a house in November 2014, and in January 2015 we found out we were pregnant. We were so excited to find out we were going to be parents, life was perfect.

But this happiness didn't last for long. Just a few weeks later I had started bleeding, and an early scan showed the baby was only measuring 5 / 6 weeks. But we should have been 10 weeks, the nurses said we must just have our dates wrong, but I didn't feel right, something was wrong.

The day after seeing our little peanut on the screen our world fell apart. I started bleeding heavily, and I was in so much pain. It was the longest night of my life.

On 6th February 2015 our baby was gone. I had miscarried naturally, and 2 weeks later a scan confirmed this. Why was this happening to us? What had we done wrong?

We lost our baby on Friday morning and I was back in work on the Monday.

I didn't know how to deal with the pain and decided getting back to 'normal' might help. I'm not sure if it helped to be honest, but it was a slight distraction from the pain.

We couldn't have got through those early days without the support of our family and close friends. We just cried and cried, I have never felt grief like it. But when you start talking about miscarriage you realise you aren't alone, and that really helped.

We decided to try again when my body was ready, and in August 2015 we found out we were pregnant again. We were excited and absolutely petrified. We couldn't go through that again. We took every day as it came up to that 12 week scan. We were so scared when that day arrived, was our baby OK? We were delighted to find out the baby was healthy, and he arrived into the world on 9th May 2016, our little rainbow baby, Leo.

Although we now have Leo, we'll never forget our first baby, and we'll light our candle as part of the Wave of Light on 15th October.

So when Water Babies announced the Splashathon and that we would be raising money for Tommy's we knew we would do our best to raise as much as we could so hopefully one day no one has to go through what we did. So thank you to all our friends and family for getting behind our rainbow baby, you guys are awesome.

Leo went on to be the UK’s top fundraiser for Water Babies in the 2017 Splashathon, raising a whopping £1,949.25.