By Rachel, Blackpool England
PROM at 22 weeks + 3 days. Delivery at 24 weeks.
Story added: 2006-01-02

I woke up one morning (23 weeks and 3 days) and found liquid running down my legs. I convinced myself I had 'wet' myself and went back to bed. A couple of hours later, the same thing happened. I told my husband and we decided to go to the delivery suite to be checked. The doctor did an internal examination and took swabs then sent me home telling me I had an incontinence problem!

Over the next few days I continued to lose liquid and then it seemed to stop. That night I had extremely bad pains,but it felt like indeigestion. the next morning I started bleeding and knew something was not right.

I went to hospital to be checked out, by this point thinking I had turned into Miss Paranoid. I was admitted to hospital, not for the bleeding but for high blood pressure. The doctor wanted it monitoring for 24 hours.

The next morning the consultant arrived and said he would send me for a scan and take blood for testing. This turned out to be one of the worst days of our lives as we were informed from the scan that there was no fluid at all round the baby.

We were spoken to by lots of doctors and midwives to tell us what would happen if labour started and what the chances of survival were. I started to pray that I would be spending Christmas and New Year and hopefully the next 3 months on bed rest in hospital.

Unfortunately I caught a sickness bug in hospital and was violently ill for 3 days, not able to eat or drink. I was given strong painkillers, antibiotics and by this point my blood pressure was over 100 and so I had to have medication to reduce it.

After recovering from all that, our little girl only managed to fight for another day. The worst part was that that day I felt better than I had in ages and was really positive. That night I had more pains and the midwife assured me it was just the baby moving without the fluid to cushion the movements. By mroning I knew something was drastically wrong and insisted the midwife found the baby's heart beat. There wasn't one. An hour later Georgia was born with no signs of life. A perfect, beautiful little girl peacefully asleep. She was born exactly 24 weeks.