A Caesarean Then Heart Surgery!

Julie’s second pregnancy was going well, until doctors delivered a devastating diagnosis…

- Jenny Stallard

Dizziness. Not that unusual when you’re 37 weeks pregnant.

I was at home, waiting for the arrival of my second baby, and about to get my son Jamie, 5, from school.

But I was feeling really off colour, my vision going blurry.

I can’t drive like this, I thought, calling my mum Mary, 56, who came straight over.

‘It’s like vertigo,’ I told Mum. ‘Or flu symptoms.’

‘Doctor, now!’ she said.

I had my blood pressure taken on both arms.

‘They’re different readings,’ he said. ‘And low. Go to hospital.’

Until then, the pregnancy had been perfect. I’d worked until the last minute at a local transport company.

My husband David, 36, drove us to the maternity unit at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in nearby Reading.

‘This is ridiculous!’ I said.

Even as they admitted me for scans on 10 February, I wasn’t concerned. And I was told I could go home.

But then the room suddenly filled with doctors.

‘You can’t go home. You’ve got a crack straight through the aorta valve in your heart. You need open-heart surgery,’ a doctor said.

I knew I had a congenital heart condition, but my first pregnancy had been fine.

‘They’re not related,’ the doctor said.