A few months back reader Lorna shared her experience of her pregnancy with Triplets. Yep, three tiny little ones. The babies have now been born and Lorna has kindly agreed to share her next stage of the story with us all. I must warn you that it is quite emotional and perhaps one that you will need a cup of tea to read and understand all the feelings and experiences that Lorna has been going through. I can’t promise there won’t be tears, there was a lot when I read it, but I hope you can spare a moment to send Lorna and her littles all your love and hugs.

Welcome to the world; Roman, Essie and Eva. My gorgeous triplets were born by elective cesarean on Monday 1 February at 1:26pm, 1:28pm and 1:29pm.

Somehow when my consultant said to me the Thursday before they were born that they’d be delivered by early the following week (as he was worried about Roman’s growth slowing, oh the irony given he was the largest at 4lb 5oz), it hadn’t really truly registered with me that I’d become a Mummy of three – and really soon.

The bit that I wasn’t prepared for was dealing with three premature babies – as they were born at 32 weeks and 1 day. Having one premature baby in the neonatal unit at hospital is really hard and emotional, having three is indescribable in terms of how much you are 100% consumed by your emotions.

My babies were small. Eva especially was really small at 2lb 12ozs, but they all came out of my tummy crying which was amazing to hear. Having them shown briefly to you over the screen (that hides what’s going on in your tummy) before being whisked away to a side room, where a team of hundreds of paediatric doctors checked them over, was hard. I didn’t get to see my babies again the day they were born, as I spent it in recovery whilst they were all in neonatal intensive care.

Being a new Mummy is supposed to be about those first precious moments and I didn’t get mine. All I wanted was to cuddle and kiss my little ones and I couldn’t. Any thoughts of wanting skin to skin went out the window. Instead I was given photos to look at which showed my babies covered in equipment and leads, as well as second hand reports of the babies from my husband, parents and sister. I was so jealous of the new Mummies on the ward who got to sleep with their baby next to their bed. Unlike me, who walked over to the neonatal unit every night to drop off some expressed breastmilk for their hourly feeds and said goodnight to my babies before sleeping in a room on my own.

Having a premature baby means your world becomes filled with machines bleeping, watching your baby so near and yet so far through the plastic of an incubator, becoming an expert in medical jargon and acronyms and also having to realise that some days not holding or cuddling your precious baby is actually the best thing for them.

You find yourself sitting patiently next to your baby’s incubator in neonatal trying to not look at other babies and also looking at them at the same time as you can’t help but try to compare your baby against someone else’s. Some babies had been on the unit ages, some were still only grams in size and everywhere there were new parents avoiding eye contact when it was obvious from your red eyes that you’d been crying.

Oh yes, the tears… Floods of tears through love, frustration and feeling truly helpless as you have to watch and wait for your baby to go through its neonatal journey. Then there are the tears of joy and happiness as your baby takes the little but so very significant steps over the weeks of being in hospital: spending their first hour without any oxygen support, not throwing up after a feed from a nasal feeding tube, leaving an incubator, drinking their first bottle and so many more things that each day make you so proud of your baby.

That first cuddle with your baby is precious. It doesn’t matter that it is when your baby is covered in wires (that are the culprits for all the bleeping you hear) and breathing oxygen from their CPAP (prem baby mummies will know this acronym, it’s a breathing aparatus that most babies have for support); all you care about is feeling them in your arms and trying not to feel scared about how small they are.

With Essie I had to wait a week for the cuddle as my little lady had a “hard birth” and ended up getting transferred by ambulance to a specialist hospital in London at 4am on Tuesday 2 February. This was only just over 12 hours after she was born. That was incredibly tough, to be told at midnight by a doctor that has been working in your baby all day, that your girl needed to be moved as she had had a massive bleed on her lungs and needs specialist attention. I will always be eternally grateful to the kind midwife who put me in a wheelchair and said you need to see your daughter before she is moved. So I did see her, albeit through floods of tears as I wasn’t sure whether she’d be ok.

Then there’s the phone calls late at night from the hospital. My heart stopped several beats whenever “private number” flashed up, as for us it meant the hospital phoning about one of our babies (especially as you live by the mantra “no news is good news”), rather than someone wanting to know if you have PPI or need to claim for an accident. More often than not it was a nurse saying they had run out of expressed breastmilk and could we bring some more in for the 8am feed. The nurses in one hospital nicknamed me ‘Daisy the Cow’ as I’d walk into the unit each morning with my mini cool bag full of 100ml bottles of expressed breast milk to put in the fridge to feed my little ones. Then we’d jump in the car to the next hospital (where Essie was) to drop off more milk. My husband reckons that in the month of Februrary we’d driven over 2,000 miles visiting our babies and delivering milk. No wonder we are both exhausted – as were leaving the house at 8am and not getting back much before 8pm.

Being a Mummy is the hardest thing I’ve ever done and we have (as parents) had a true baptism of fire and someone somewhere decided to give us a ridiculously hard parenting challenge from day one. It has also made me realise that I definitely married the right guy, as I couldn’t have done any of this without my husband. Knowing that he is my rock and I am his gives me strength every second of every day.

Unfortunately Essie is a very poorly girl, we found out when she was two weeks old that she had had a stroke and her brain had been impacted, again attributed to her “difficult birth” as they believe the girls had Twin to Twin Transfusion at birth (as Essie had very high acid levels in her blood). The Doctors said that they’d do another head scan a week later to check to see if the bleed on her brain had got larger, but they already told us to expect Essie to have problems with her learning and development.

Nothing however could have prepared us for what the second head scan showed. Essie, our beautiful girl, is severely brain damaged and the second head scan showed that her brain had collapsed in on itself in several areas and where it had “died” it had been replaced by fluid – which is why her head looks large. Her medical notes read “catastrophic brain injury” and when we were taken into a side room by the consultant to discuss her head scan we heard the words no parent ever wants to hear… Our little girl has a life limiting injury and won’t be with us for long. How long “long” is we don’t know, it could be months or it could be years.

I won’t lie to you. I was an absolute mess and cried so much. But then we made a pact. We would do all we could to keep Essie in comfort and pain free, but would let nature take its course and as harsh as it sounds focus on her brother and sister, who will be her legacy.

You might not agree with our decision. But as parents to triplets we have to think of all three babies (as well as ourselves). It is one of the hardest and easiest decisions we have made. This was how parenthood started for us within the first month of our triplets arriving – a piece of paper that says you don’t want your daughter resuscitated if she stops breathing, catches an infection that she can’t fight with antibiotics or whatever daily things she is vulnerable too (as it’s a long list).

Where are we now… Roman and Eva have been home since the end of February as ‘only’ spent four weeks in hospital. Essie has been transferred from her London hospital to another one nearer to where we live. She is on oxygen support, feeding from a nasal tube (as can’t swallow) and has a heated mattress for her cot (as she can’t regulate her temperature). This is likely where she will be now, so we have started discussions with a children’s hospice and social services to try and get us the support we need to bring her home.

I’ll be honest with you, the thought of having Essie at home terifies me. It is hard enough caring for two premature babies without factoring in another severely disabled baby. But I do want her home, so very much, but only if we get the 24/7 support we need to look after her as I cannot stand over her cot all night to check she’s still breathing. Not when we have two other very young babies to look after too.

I fear it might be a fight to get what we need for Essie. I hope it isn’t, but we are both, as parents of our precious girl, prepared to dig our heels in and say what we need to have in place before we can bring her home.

This wasn’t the update I had hoped I’d write for you about my babies. But it is our reality and our lives have changed forever. Being a parent brings with it an awful lot of responsibility and you are tasked with making decisions for your little people when they aren’t able to. As well as feeling guilty about those decisions and questioning how well you are doing as a new Mummy (or Daddy) everyday.

Being a Mummy is a hard job and being a Mummy of triplets is very hard. And I am only at the start of my journey.

One final thought about the nurses in the neonatal units that have treated (and continue to treat) our triplets – you are angels in disguise and got to know our babies personalities and quirks so well. To each and every one of them, thank you from the bottom of my heart.