The Echo: A mum who tragically lost five babies said her family is now complete after giving birth to a healthy ‘rainbow’ baby boy. Cath Ascroft suffered three devastating miscarriages, a traumatic stillbirth at 20 weeks and the painful loss of baby Hendrix, who lived just 12 hours before he died.
The 43-year-old, who already has an eight-year-old son Marley, said she was “overjoyed” when she and partner Jonny Hall became pregnant.
The couple, from Southport, had only been trying for a couple of months, but their happiness turned to tragedy when her waters broke at 20 weeks.
In shock Cath rang the maternity unit at Ormskirk Hospital who told her to come straight in.
She said: “Within a few hours I’d delivered my baby.
“Thinking back now I was in shock.
“When they brought him to us a perfect tiny baby boy, wrapped in a blanket I didn’t know how to feel. “I only held him for a short time, I couldn’t process what had happened. “We didn’t even name him this little boy who’d never even had a chance at life. “Ormskirk Hospital paid for the funeral which Jonny and I went to alone. “We just didn’t know the right thing to do, so we sat at the crematorium together and cried.“It was so hard trying to carry on, going back into work to see all the sympathetic faces, struggling to find the words to explain there was no baby to our two year old.”
Apart from Cath being a carrier of the common Group B Strep infection, there was no medical explanation for why it had happened.
And doctors told her and her husband there was no reason for them not to try again when they felt ready.
Just five months later Cath fell pregnant again, but at 10 weeks she started with heavy bleeding and the hospital confirmed she’d miscarried.
She added: “Looking back I tried to brush it off pretend it hadn’t bothered me, taking just one day off before going back to work.
“I’d keep saying things like, ‘there was obviously something wrong with the baby’ or ‘at least it wasn’t as bad as last time’ as a way of putting it away in an emotional box.
“Because the truth it was hard, because losing a baby at any stage in a pregnancy is devastating and horrible, but it was the only way for me to deal with it.”
Following her second miscarriage Cath decided to concentrate on being a mum to Marley, but the following year fell pregnant again.