Over recent weeks, there’s been one news story that I’ve found almost unbearable to watch. It’s that of the neonatal nurse Lucy Letby, who has just been found guilty of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder others while working on a hospital's neonatal unit between June 2015 and June 2016. Lucy was working at the Countess of Chester Hospital at the time of the murders and has now been named the UK's most prolific child killer of modern times. And while no one could be immune to the horrors of this case, I feel it more keenly than others. Because I’m all too aware that I could have easily found myself in the same situation as those grieving parents.
My daughter was just three weeks old when she suddenly became ill in the middle of the night. Despite being a first-time parent in the grip of that heady cocktail of post-natal hormones and sleep deprivation, I instinctively knew something was very wrong – her skin had taken on an odd, yellowish tinge and her cry was like nothing I’d heard before, high-pitched and screechy. My husband and I drove her to our local NHS hospital, where she was immediately rushed into resus (short for ‘resuscitation’), where patients are taken if they need life-saving treatment.
Within minutes a dozen members of staff were by her side, trying to figure out what was wrong with her – paediatric doctors, neonatal nurses, anaesthetists, surgeons, ICU consultants, all barking instructions at each other. As soon as she was stabilised, she was whisked away to the ICU, and when we next saw her, she was lying in a hospital bed attached to countless tubes and machines. A ventilator covered most of her sweet face and she was so bloated from the fluid that was being pumped into her that she was almost unrecognisable.
From that moment my life went into freefall, as I struggled to comprehend how my tiny daughter, who I’d been cuddling and feeding only that morning, had suddenly been ripped from my grasp. I was no longer able to care for her – instead, that task was handed over to a succession of ICU nurses, who looked after her during the three weeks she spent in intensive care. Two years later, I still remember every one of their names. There was Daisy, who looked after her on her very first day, and Ellie, who would try to take my mind off things by telling me about her travels. There was Alice, who brought me endless cups of tea, and Miriam, who would give me updates on her children at home. When I see the pictures in the news of Lucy Letby cradling the babies that were left in her care – babies that it’s alleged she later killed by injecting them with fatal doses of air or insulin - my blood runs cold. She could have been any one of the nurses who looked after my daughter.
Nothing can prepare you for the moment when you have to hand your newborn baby over to strangers. Those nurses held my daughter’s life in their hands, and in my desperation to see her get better it never occurred to me that they could do her harm. We are conditioned to trust doctors and nurses, to believe without question that they have the best interests of their patients at heart. And while the vast majority of them do, it only takes a case like Lucy Letby’s to remind us that we cannot and should not trust anyone implicitly – not when the stakes are so high.
So, how do you cope if you find yourself in that situation? “For any of my patients who are having to cope with a critically sick baby, I tend to focus on practical things,” says Dr Marielle Quint, a Chartered Clinical Psychologist at The Soke who specialises in supporting new parents. “First, locate the people you really trust, whether that’s friends or family members. Is there any way you can share care with them while in the hospital? Then there’s the oxygen mask principle – it can be so hard when babies are sick, because you want to be there 24/7, but self-care has to come first at a very basic level. Make sure you’re getting enough sleep and some kind of nutrition, otherwise if you’re not up to it, it’s just not possible to care for that baby. And take it one minute, one hour at a time – it’s all too easy to fall down a Google hell hole, but when you find yourself in that situation you need to know when to limit the never-ending flow of information before it becomes overwhelming.”
As well as looking after your basic physical needs, it’s also hugely important to address any mental health or post-traumatic stress issues that all too often crop up after situations like this. For those suffering from PTSD, Dr Quint recommends specific treatments like EMDR (short for Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing), which uses bilateral stimulation through eye movements to help process traumatic memories, and EFT or tapping, which helps alleviate stress and anxiety. If you find certain sounds, smells or locations (like hospitals) particularly triggering, you might want to engage in some exposure therapy to build your way back up to being able to tolerate them again (particularly if you find yourself having to spend prolonged periods of time in them, perhaps during subsequent pregnancies).
However, Dr Quint is also keen to point out that true PTSD – which tends to be associated with things like flashbacks, nightmares and heightened states of emotion – is actually a lot less common than we might think. “The term is one that’s bandied about a lot, but actually true PTSD is pretty horrifying,” she says. “It’s also important to emphasise that it doesn’t have to be triggered by an objectively horrific event – PTSD is very subjective. It’s the way that you experience it as traumatic that’s key.” And not everyone requires therapy to overcome trauma – for me, talking it all through with my friends and family was enough. “That is absolutely a valid response,” says Dr Quint. “You’re an expert in yourself. For some people, going through an experience like this will be crippling and they need help, while others can process it in quite a functional way and still be ok.”
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For me, the best tonic was seeing my daughter get better – during her time in the ICU she had four surgeries to correct an undetected issue with her bowel that had been there since birth, and after two further months on the surgical ward she was allowed to come home. Now my daughter is a happy, healthy two-year-old and it’s unlikely she’ll have any long-term health repercussions. But I’m all too aware that she’s one of the lucky ones, and when a case like Lucy Letby’s comes along, it reminds me how important it is to never take that for granted. During our time in the ICU, I met mothers who didn’t get to go home with their babies, and those memories will stay with me forever. “When you lose a child, the most important thing is to take the time to process and to grieve,” says Dr Quint. “Overcoming that loss is not something you can put a timeline on.”
For information and support on baby loss, visit tommys.org or sands.org.uk.
