Ellie’s Story

Posted this an hour or so ago on my poker blog, and I don’t care who knows……………. I’m sat here crying like a drunken baby, listening to the song that we played ar Ellie’s funeral, Whitney Houstons version of I will always love you.

I wrote whats below today, for Ellie’s website. Then I decided to post it here. I’t my way of shouting to the world the stuff I’ve bottled up for the last 8 years:

Today is the 3rd June 2007, it’s exactly 8 years ago today that Ellie died, almost to the very minute. James Blunt is playing on the radio …………the words “ I don’t think I will see her again, but were shared a moment that will last to the end………………” from his huge hit Beautiful. How poignant.
When I woke this morning my first thought was of Ellie, images of the day she died raced through my mind and it was like re-living the whole thing in a split second. This is difficult, but it’s probably the best time to write it down.
23rd June, my daughters mother, Sharron, went into labour three months too early. I took her to our local hospital, where for about six or seven hours they tried all they could to stop labour, but it was not to be. An emergency caesarean was preformed and I became the proud father of two beautiful little girls. Ellie, first born and weighing in at 2 pounds and one ounce, and Jade , who weighed in at 2 pounds and eight ounces.
The very first time that I set eyes on Ellie, she was surrounded by a team of nurses and doctors, who were “working” on her. I asked the doctor in charge what Ellie’s chances of survival were and was told that she had less than a 50% chance of living and that if she made it through the night then her chances would significantly increase.
Now you may not know this, but, they make us of out of tough stuff in Yorkshire, and Ellie was no exception. Ellie was a fighter, even before she was born. She was in fact the reason that both my girls were born so early. Ellie had initiated labour when the umbilical cord had become wrapped around her neck. Even before birth we must have the basic instinct to survive, Ellie was being strangled and something in her barely developed mind told her she had to get out in order to survive. Ellie made it through the night.
The next day we were informed that Ellie and Jade would have to be transferred to another hospital, as there was not enough room in the neonatal intensive care unit to keep them together. So they were transferred to Burnley.
On the 1st of July Ellie became quite ill. On the 2nd of July, we were informed that Ellie needed to be transferred to St Mary’s in Manchester for an emergency operation. She was suffering from septicaemia of the bowl.
Arrangements were made and an ambulance and specialist nurse arrived from Manchester to transfer her.
Sharron and myself followed the ambulance in our car as best we could, although I tried to stay with the ambulance, the blue flashing lights soon disappeared into traffic. We made our way to Manchester as fast as possible.
Arriving in Manchester was a nightmare, I didn’t have a clue where the hospital was and had never driven in Manchester before. We quickly made the decision to dump the car in the nearest car park and jump into a taxi.
When we arrived at St Mary’s we were taken to the ward where Ellie was. We were greeted by the sight of a furious row. The consultant, who was to be in charge of Ellie, was having a real all guns blazing row with the nurse that had cared for Ellie on the journey to Manchester. The argument was about whether or not Ellie should be x-rayed at this particular time. The consultant was shouting that he wanted x-rays and he wanted them now. The nurse was shouting back at him, telling him that she needed to recover from her journey and that he was only just getting her temperature back to normal.
The argument ended with the nurse storming off the ward, as he walked past Sharron and myself he said words that will haunt me for the rest of my life “that man is a fucking idiot”
This is the hardest part of the story for me. I stood there and watched these two arguing and shouting at each other. That’s it, that’s all I did…………. watch. Who knows what might have come to be if I had spoke up, if only I had said “no! There will be no x-rays until she is recovered from her journey” I had every right to do that I was (am) her dad. I had been a dad for 9 days and I didn’t know what to do.
The upshot was that the consultant told us that Ellie would probably not need an operation. I now believe that to mean “ the truth is your daughter is not worth the price of an operation as she will probably not survive one”
After a few hours we were told that the best thing we could do was to go home and get some rest and come back the next day. Of course we would have preferred to stay there with Ellie, but we also had Jade in another hospital in Burnley.
We drove back to Burnley to see jade and make sure she was OK before heading for home and trying to get some sleep, which was of course practically impossible.
4:30am 3rd July 1999, the telephone rings. It’s the consultant from Manchester informing us that Ellie had suffered a cardiac arrest at midnight, but she was stable again and would be OK, reassured us that there was no point rushing to Manchester at that time of the morning.
5:30am the telephone rings again. The consultant. “your daughter is going to die, get here as quickly as you can” He then went on to ask me if we wanted Ellie to be christened before she died. I told him that, that would not be necessary as we were not religious and did not believe in God . He response was something along the lines of didn’t I care that my daughter was going to die without being christened. I was furious! I let him know this in no uncertain terms and told him that I would be seeing him as soon as I arrived at the hospital. Needless to say by the time we got there he had cleared off never to be seen again.
The time spent at the hospital on the 23rd was definitely the worst day of my life. The way that we were treated was nothing short of a disgrace in my opinion.
We were shown to a tiny waiting room, with if memory serves me correctly, just six hard backed chairs. A dingy little place, not the sort of place you could take any sort of comfort in while you wait for your child to die. Not even a drinks machine.
Sharron was so distressed that she couldn’t even enter the ward where Ellie was. Ellie was by this time bloated and looked discoloured and bruised. Nothing like the beautiful little girl of 10 days previously. I tried to divide my time between sitting with Ellie and returning to the waiting room to try and comfort her mother.
I distinctly remember at one point whist I was sitting next to Ellie’s incubator, a nurse administering something to her via a drip. When I asked what they were giving her, I was told it was something to paralyse her and to stop her from fighting. Looking back I have to question why you would give a baby a drug to paralyse her, when it was her life that she was fighting for!
As I mentioned earlier, there had been very little sleep the previous day, both Sharron and I were on our last legs. There was nothing in the way of comfort being offered from the hospital, so we agreed that we would go out to our car which was parked right by the entrance to the hospital, and try to get some sort of rest for an hour or so. I told the staff at the hospital exactly where we would be if there was the slightest change either way in Ellie. I also gave them my mobile phone number, just in case we left the car.
I’m not quite sure how, but I managed to doze off in the car, horrible images drifted through my mind as I slept. At 12:30pm, I was instantly roused from my disturbed slumber by the ringing of my mobile phone. The person on the other end of the line told me that she was a nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit, and asked where we were! I replied that we were where I said we would be, outside the entrance to the building in my car. She then went on to tell me that Ellie had died an hour ago. I can’t tell you how horrible that felt, the thought that our daughter had died an hour previously, alone.
Back in the hospital, we had two doctors try to explain to us, at the height of our grief , how Ellie had died. I don’t remember one word, just that the explanation was filled with medical terms, that we neither understood or cared about, our daughter was dead. Finally we were offered a cup of tea!
A little later we were told that we could, if we wished, see Ellie in the “Rainbow Room” a beautiful room that very much resembled a nursery . A place where we could hold her for the last time and say our goodbyes. I wont even try to convey how emotional that fifteen minutes or so was for us.
Upon leaving the Rainbow Room there were two nurses waiting for us. One was quite a bit younger than the other and probably relatively new to the job, she asked the older nurse if she should go and wait with Ellie in the Rainbow Room. She was told in no uncertain terms that Ellie was not going anywhere and would be just fine alone. This was in front of Ellie’s mum and myself. Do years of working in places like this really erode peoples compassion to the point that they have no sensitivity at all?
The final Humiliation of the day came, when I asked about an ambulance to transport Ellie home. We were told that they couldn’t afford to send her back to Yorkshire in a ambulance, However, we could if we so wished, take her home on the back seat of our car. Needless to say an offer that we rejected.
I don’t remember what time we left Manchester that day, but seem to remember it was getting dark as we arrived at Burnley on our way home to see Jade. When we first arrived at Burnley, I couldn’t go inside the hospital, I was so stricken with grief that I didn’t even know if I could love Jade, now I can’t imagine loving anyone more.
When I finally walked into the neonatal intensive care unit, a nurse, Mel, who had been very kind to both our babies and us, since they first arrived, tried to give me a hug, I just shrugged her off. I could hardly look at Jade.
One thing that struck me as strange was that we were told that approximately the time of Ellie’s death Jade started to scream and seemed almost inconsolable. Up to that point she had been the quiet one of the two, hardly crying and very placid. Ellie was the feisty one, trying to fight the nurses off when she was touched and exercising her lungs for the world to hear. After Ellie’s death, Jade seemed to become louder and more feisty, I often wonder if at the point of Ellie’s death a little of her (spirit?) was transferred to Jade.

Sweet Dreams Ellie, Sleep Tight