I HAD NO MEMORY OF THEM

After giving birth, Sylwia McGinty was left fighting for her life

- ANN CUSACK, FRANCES LEATE

I watched, helpless, as the nurse came in carrying a little bundle wrapped in a white, cotton blanket and yellow hat. Closing my eyes, to see or touch this baby that the nurses and my husband, Dean, then 36, kept insisting was mine. ‘I called him Frank, on to my chest. It was July 2019 and, birth to Frank two weeks earlier, chest like he was a stranger.

The foggy mist of confusion was terrifying, and I felt nothing but relief when Dean lifted him from my chest and took him away.

‘Why am I here?’ I sobbed later, when Dean returned. ‘What happened?’ I remembered Dean, and knew he was my husband, but everything else felt so hazy. ‘Try to sleep,’ he soothed, before I slipped back into a deep slumber. It was days later before I came round again, but everything was still so confusing and the memories only slowly trickle back.

I remembered I’d discovered I was pregnant with Frank in December 2018, and Dean and I had been overjoyed. And then I remembered that when I was three months pregnant, every time I knelt down to pick something up from the floor I’d felt a sharp pain in the back of my left leg. Eventually, it got so bad that Dean rushed me to hospital. I was told I had deep vein thrombosis and I needed blood-thinning injections twice a day, and daily scans at the hospital to check on the baby.