Our son Joey was born at 38+5 weeks after what we thought would be a completely normal birth and the beginning of the happiest time of our lives.
My waters had broken around 48 hours before Joey was born, so we were kept in hospital after his birth and told that he would need to stay for 12 hours to be observed. Joey was born just after midnight, and at around 2am, I became concerned that his breathing didn’t look right. I called the midwives through because, as his mum, I knew something wasn’t quite right. I was told that he had wind and that this was likely the reason for what I was seeing.
By 5am, I called the midwives again. This time, they immediately realised how unwell Joey was. His oxygen levels were dangerously low and his temperature was also low. Within minutes, our tiny newborn was rushed to the Special Care Baby Unit. He was put straight onto CPAP to help him breathe, connected to an IV drip and started on antibiotics.
We went from thinking we were simply spending a few extra hours in hospital with our newborn baby, to being told that he was seriously ill.
After tests, we found out that Joey had sepsis caused by Group B Streptococcus (GBS). It is difficult to put into words what it feels like to learn that your newborn baby has a potentially life-threatening infection that could have been prevented if you had known you were carrying GBS.
Thankfully, Joey was a healthy weight and his infection was identified and treated quickly. But the following 10 days were some of the most terrifying days of our lives.
Joey fought so hard every single day. He had blood tests, lumbar punctures and countless little pricks.
He spent five days in an incubator, and for those five days we watched our tiny baby surrounded by machines and medical equipment instead of being at home, enjoying those precious first days together. Eventually, things started to improve. For the final five days, we were lucky enough to see Joey in a cot rather than an incubator. He was gradually able to come off the support he needed, and eventually he was able to feed from a bottle instead of through a tube.
After 10 long days in Special Care, we were finally able to take our baby boy home.
Joey is now almost three weeks old, and we feel incredibly lucky and grateful that he made such a strong recovery. But our experience has changed the way we look at GBS completely.
We had never expected this to happen to us. We had no idea that I could carry GBS without knowing it, or that it could result in our seemingly healthy newborn developing sepsis within just a few hours of being born.
Those first 10 days of Joey’s life should have been spent at home getting to know our baby, recovering from birth and enjoying becoming a family. Instead, we spent them sitting beside an incubator, watching monitors, waiting for test results and wondering what each day would bring.
We are incredibly grateful for the doctors, nurses and staff who cared for Joey and helped him get home to us. But we also feel strongly that parents deserve the opportunity to know whether they are carrying GBS before they give birth.
If a simple swab could identify mothers carrying GBS and allow appropriate antibiotics to be given during labour, potentially preventing babies from becoming seriously ill, we believe parents should be given that choice.
Joey was one of the lucky ones. He is home with us, he is growing, and at almost three weeks old we are finally able to start enjoying the newborn days we thought we would have from the beginning.
But we will never forget how quickly everything changed.
We hope that by sharing Joey’s story, we can help raise awareness of GBS and support the campaign for routine screening, so that other families do not have to experience what we did.