Since the birth of her daughter we have had daily updates on the condition of Sophie Wessex and her child, but strangely hardly a word about how things are for Edward. All we knew was that Edward was "looking increasingly concerned" as he commuted between hospitals. I bet he was. Five years ago I suffered from placenta abruptio, like Sophie, when giving birth to my first child. Like the Wessexes, the spotlight of attention fell on me and on our baby son - understandably, since we were both seriously ill. But the plight of my husband, Tom, went largely unnoticed: and for him it was every bit as traumatic.
Having a baby should have been a shared experience; instead, for Tom as much as for any of us, it was an ordeal. Today, he can voice the fears he had to keep hidden at the time; what he feared, he says, was that I would never get back to normal, never be able to cope with our son. What he dreaded was that life as we knew it had disappeared, that we would never be able to put it all back together again.
Placenta abruptio happens when the placenta peels away from the womb lining, starving the foetus of oxygen and, in some cases, causing maternal haemorrhage so severe that, if medical intervention is not swift, both mother and child can quickly die. It is a medical emergency that is certainly guaranteed to interrupt the consultant's round of golf.
On the night it happened we had people coming to supper so we were cooking, and I remember making homemade pesto for the first and last time. Just before our guests were due to arrive I thought I felt my waters break but when I looked down I saw blood. Quite a lot of it. I never got to taste that pesto.
From that moment Tom became very calm, though there was a definite sense of foreboding. He put me in the car and we drove to the hospital, where I was given the classic ER, full-on treatment and whipped straight into theatre for an emergency caesarean under general anaesthetic. Tom was left alone to pace the corridor outside the theatre. Nobody explained what the problem was - there simply wasn't the time with two lives to save - and he wouldn't have known what placenta abruptio meant anyway. He was just told they had to get the baby out as soon as possible.
Thirty minutes later the nurse came out to show Tom our baby son, while I was still spark-out on the operating table. He was on the small side at 5lb 11oz, but he was fine and so was I. Tom was happy we were both all right, but at the same time he felt very numb.
Tom tells me that when he eventually saw me I was very drugged up and was talking gibberish. Apparently I couldn't remember what sex our baby was, and nearly drove him to distraction by asking over and over again. I had a blood transfusion in one arm, a drip in the other, and a crowd of medical staff peering down at me. It had been quite an exciting night for them. The doctor told Tom he was lucky not to have lost both his wife and child, though I remained unaware as to what a close call it had been.
Tom went off to telephone friends and family to tell them the "happy" news, though he broke down in tears when talking to his mother. It just wasn't supposed to be like this. He stayed with me and the baby until the early hours, then went home to sleep.
Tom describes the next week as like living in a twilight zone. He cancelled work so he could spend his days at the hospital. I was having trouble breastfeeding the baby and was in a mess physically and emotionally. I had had major abdominal surgery, lost a lot of blood, was anaemic, my blood pressure was off the scale and I had to cope with a newborn baby too. I remember the nurses saying "calm down, Mrs Lynch, you'll have a stroke". Tom says I was abusive to some of the staff, and I am embarrassed to admit that it is true. Let's just say I wasn't myself. It was a time of fear and confusion, when I felt totally out of control and unable to cope. To be honest I thought having a baby had been a big mistake, but that was something I couldn't tell a soul.
What should have been a happy time turned into a very lonely experience for Tom. I still wasn't aware how close to death we had been, and Tom felt nobody understood what he was going through. Friends and family were calling to congratulate him and presents and flowers arrived by the truckload. As a new father he should have felt ecstatic, but inside him was a void.
Stanley and I came home after nine days in hospital. Tom was still unable to work as he had to cook, shop and keep visitors away since I still didn't feel well enough to see many people. I had trouble bonding and was terrified of being left alone with our son. I was a career woman used to being in control, but suddenly I was dependent and felt a failure, unable even to look after my own baby. Tom secretly worried that I would never be able to cope, but as the weeks passed things slowly began to improve
He tells me that at the time everything was so dramatic he just operated on auto-pilot, but with hindsight he feels cheated. He was never part of the birth, but was on the periphery, not knowing what was going on. He recently drove a friend to hospital when his wife went into labour. They had a "normal" birth in which the father played an active part, and they were able to go home with their baby the next day: the kind of positive experience Tom feels he missed out on. Ironically, it was a few months later - just as life was becoming "normal" for Stanley and for me, with life a constant round of mums' coffee mornings and lunches with friends - that Tom had a delayed reaction and suffered what I suppose was post-traumatic stress.
Hearing Tom talk about Stanley's birth now makes me very sad. Having a baby is supposed to be a joyful and life-changing experience, but for us it was a nightmare. Tom was too polite to call me a madwoman, but that is more or less what I became. As I read how Sophie is "heavily sedated" and "very distressed", the whole thing comes flooding back to me. Nine days is a lifetime on a maternity ward: I would watch other women leave the ward within 24 hours of giving birth, breastfeeding their babies easily and looking adoringly at them, and then I would draw my cubicle curtains and cry.
Of course, things were OK for us in the end, but it took a long time; although Stanley and I were lucky to always be in the same hospital together, it was at least six weeks before I started to bond with him. In time, my baby did become the joy of my life. In fact, I think ultimately it was Tom who was more scarred than me by the whole experience. Is it any surprise that, five years on, we are wary of repeating childbirth? A second pregnancy would, Tom especially feels, be tempting fate. We are lucky to have Stanley, and after what we have all been through, he will probably be our only child.
