Baby Bronagh’s mother pleaded not to be transferred to Cavan
It was 5.30am in Monaghan hospital on Tuesday December 10 and Denise Livingstone, 32, knew that her baby’s birth was imminent.
“Don’t send me to Cavan. I’m not going to make it,” she told the ambulance attendants.
“You will, Denise, just calm down, we’ll get you there,” they said.
In an interview with an Irish Sunday newspaper, Denise recalled the bumpy 30 mile journey in the ambulance. Her upset partner Barry Kerr, 30, was following behind in his van. She did her best to hold the contractions as long as she could, holding onto the sleeve of the ambulance attendant’s uniform. “I just felt a really big contraction that I couldn’t stop. I said to Noel (the ambulance attendant) that it was coming and he pulled off my pyjama bottoms, then there was this long “whoosh” sound and she came out.”
Baby Bronagh was born at 6am in the back of the ambulance with her legs emerging first, a breech birth. “I was shocked to see her because I really didn’t think I still had a baby and then I saw her, so small, like a little doll. Once I held her hand, she was mine.
The baby was crying loudly in the ambulance with a slight bruising on the side of her head from the delivery. She weighed 1lb and 10oz. “You just hold on. You just hold on,” Denise whispered to her tiny daughter as Bronagh gripped her finger.
When the ambulance finally arrived at Cavan General Hospital, staff cut the umbilical cord and Bronagh was taken to an incubator unit. Staff came in shortly afterwards to tell Denise that they were going to move Bronagh to the high-tech baby care unit in the Dublin’s Rotunda hospital.
Then the paediatrician arrived and told her that Bronagh’s condition was deteriorating. “The minute I saw the doctor’s face, I knew that the news was bad. By the time I got to her, she had passed over,” said Denise.
She held Bronagh, whose immature lungs had given in, for the entire day, sitting in her hospital room in her wheelchair. Bronagh was officially christened in the hospital and buried the next day after a funeral service. “I said to Barry, ‘I think it’s time to let her go.’ Her expression had changed. Up until then, she had looked as if she was sleeping peacefully. But suddenly she looked cross as if she’d had enough,” Denise said.
Denise is determined to campaign for the resumption of the maternity unit in Monaghan General Hospital. “I’m afraid what happened to me is going to happen to other mothers,” she said.
