A FINAL GOODBYE

When Mina Blair’s daughter passed away, she couldn’t see a way forward

- FIONA KINLOCH

Sitting at the bedside of my daughter Francesca, then 12, I tried my best to put on a brave face. It was November 2007 and she’d been hospitalised after collapsing a couple of nights earlier. For years, Francesca had suffered a multitude of severe illnesses, and I lived each day with the expectation that it was her last. But now, after doctors disclosed that her deteriorating lungs were unresponsive to treatment, I knew it was truly the end. Treatment was stopped, machines packed away and after consent from medics, I told Francesca we were going home. ‘OK, but not for the last time, though?’ she said, a slight infliction in her voice. ‘No,’ I replied softly, unable to tell my daughter it was to be the last trip she’d ever make.

Francesca’s health problems began before she was born. At the end of my first trimester of pregnancy, in spring 1995, my toddler Karina had contracted chickenpox while at nursery, and just weeks later, I noticed the tell-tale fluid-filled bumps on my own skin. I didn’t know I hadn’t had the disease before, but my doctor told me the virus couldn’t cross the placenta and not to worry. Only, at seven months, my belly was much bigger than it had been with Karina and scans showed my baby was floating in a vast amount of amniotic fluid.