- My name's Natalie King and I live in Surrey
with my husband and my two boys.
In 2015, I had my second son, Miles,
who was a happy healthy baby,
following a very difficult birth.
When he was seven weeks old,
we put him to bed as normal.
He went to sleep. He was already a really good sleeper.
And he woke up in the middle of the night at,
just after midnight, very unsettled.
After a few hours, we noticed that he was making a sound
which sounded a little bit like straining.
It was very similar to a sound
that he made nearly every morning, which was like gas.
You know, he was a newborn baby.
We didn't really think anything of that.
But then when I went to change his nappy,
once it was a little bit lighter and I put the lights on,
I noticed that his skin was a sort of gray, gray tone.
And, and that's when alarm bells started to ring for me.
I couldn't explain that.
And I wasn't happy to wait to go to the GP,
because they weren't open yet.
And so I decided to take him straight to hospital.
And I remember the doctor coming
and taking all his clothes off
and asking me how long he'd had like a purple,
tiny purple spot under his arm.
And I hadn't even noticed it up in that point.
And that was the first time that they said,
you know we think that that could be meningitis.
We're not sure, but we're gonna treat him
with antibiotics just in case.
As they gave him antibiotics and they gave him fluid
that pinprick, purple pinprick mark then turned into a rash,
a purple rash that almost entirely covered his body.
And as I explained, that was septicemia.
He was transferred to Southampton General Hospital
where at three o'clock in the afternoon
he went into cardiac arrest very quickly, very suddenly,
and the doctors couldn't bring him back from that,
and unfortunately, he died at three o'clock the same day.
The grief is like, is a pain like no other
and I think all parents would agree.
I remember leaving hospital
with very little support from the hospital staff
and driving home from Southampton and just feeling,
you are just plunged
into a world that you don't understand.
You don't,
you can't understand what's just happened around you.
You can't understand why you're going home without a child.
When you've gone into hospital with a child.
And also feeling very angry.
You know, we were driving home
and you can see everybody going about their normal lives.
So I remember feeling just complete shock and the Wilderman
and anger at the world that actually our life had stopped.
And the world was just carrying on.
I had a lot of feelings of wondering
if I was going to be good enough for my older child.
You know, I felt extreme guilt at having,
having failed Miles.
You know, was there more that I could have done?
Should I have taken him to the hospital sooner?
So it was just a real mixture of emotions and,
and the grief did change.
You know, it did change from anger and shock to guilt
to just then just, just general sadness
and wondering if life is ever gonna feel the same again.
Because Miles was only a couple of months old
and because he wasn't previously ill or anything,
he died very quickly after being taken into hospital.
They did a Child Death Review.
So we were assigned someone from the NHS who worked as part
of the child death review team who had visited us
to go over the details of what had happened.
It didn't feel like we were being tested or judged
or anything.
We knew that they were doing that review to make sure
that everything was done correctly
at the hospital and things like that.
So the Child Death Review went on sort of behind the scenes.
Really, we didn't have to go anywhere.
We didn't have to get involved.
And then of course we had arrange a funeral.
And I think, you know,
if you arrange a funeral for an older person, you,
you are very aware
that you want it to be a celebration of their life
and things like that, but it feels,
feels very different when it's a young child
because they haven't been with you for very long.
So everything feels very wrong
about planning the funeral for your child.
I would say the two key things that helped
at the time when we lost Miles was talking
to an independent Grief Counselor,
someone that we didn't know, someone who didn't judge us
and who, and it was her job,
she knew the right things to say.
And she was able to tell us
that what we were were experiencing was normal.
She could listen to our very dark thoughts,
what we were feeling and what we were thinking,
and tell us that was a normal way to be
because it didn't feel very normal at all, at the time.
It was really important to talk
to the Meningitis Research Foundation.
I feel like I had a lot
of unanswered questions in my head about meningitis
and why Miles had died
and what it all did to the body.
Why, you know, why he didn't present with symptoms
that I thought he should have.
And they were, you know,
they provided me with a lot of information
to help me process those questions and move forward.
They allowed me to come to seminars with doctors
and meet the doctors that were doing the research
and things like that.
All of that was really key
in me and my coping mechanisms
and processing all those unanswered questions
that I had in my head.
And my oldest son, Tristan, was nearly two, not quite two
when Miles was born and when Miles died.
Tristan obviously played on my mind
a huge amount, having to break that news to him.
He was very aware that Miles wasn't there anymore.
He would ask questions at very random times
but as a, as a toddler, you know
we could be playing Lego and he could be talking about that,
and then he'd suddenly say something
about Miles and it would shock us,
and then he'd just go back and play Lego again.
The counselor told us that we had to
be really brutally honest about death with Tristan,
and it goes completely against what you wanna do
with young people and young children.
You don't want to tell your young child all about death
and what dead means and things,
you wanna keep them in a bubble for a really long time,
but here we found in ourselves in a situation
where we had to explain our two year old
what being dead meant and being very honest
about Miles being dead. It was a difficult thing to do.
But when I look back, I know
that it was the right thing to do.
Tristan can and has always been able to talk
to us about death and how he's felt about Miles.
He can be open and honest about it when he has questions.
He asks us, you know, those questions
and we can be honest with our answers to him.
Since I had Miles, I've had another boy.
So Elliot is three now,
but when I became pregnant with Elliot
it was nearly two years after I'd lost Miles,
because it had taken that long
for me to even consider thinking about another baby.
So the pregnancy with my, with Elliot.
So my, my third boy, was difficult.
It was physically, I was fine, but mentally I,
I worried about everything.
So when Elliot was a newborn,
I struggled quite a lot with the,
in terms of my mental health.
I felt like
I didn't feel very attached, emotionally, to Elliott.
I felt that I just worried that I would lose him.
So I thought if I didn't get to attached to him
and if I lost him, it wouldn't be so bad.
But when I look back now, I think that sounds crazy.
But at the time I was just so,
you know the grief of Miles came back again,
and you know, when I saw Elliott, I saw Miles.
So,
then,
I struggled at nighttime
to fall asleep for quite a period of time.
What I would do is I would, I'd go to bed
and at night I would go through and think
about all the things that I'd done with the children
and all the things that could have gone wrong.
And it was a very dark place to be.
It was only when I spoke to my counselor that she said
that's the sort of thing that,
that PTSD presents as,
you know, the thinking over and over again about
Miles at the hospital
and how how he died in the hospital
and then relating that
to my children and how they might die.
We talk about Miles a lot less now
but we still, you know, we have anniversaries.
So we celebrate what would've been Miles' birthday
by going to a park where we've got the memorial bench,
and I think that's really important.
Tristan always gets involved in planning that
in getting the balloons and doing cards for him,
which he really enjoys.
And that gives us opportunity to talk to Miles as well
and to talk to Tristan about Miles.
My advice for anyone that's struggling
with their mental health
is to try and be open with the people closest
to them about how they're feeling, even if they cannot,
they don't have the right things to say at the time.
If they know how you are feeling,
they can be there for you to try and pick you up,
to offer support,
even if it's in practical terms,
or try and find some other specialist support for you.
And if you can take time out for yourself to
clear your mind outside, that's really helpful.