A mum has spoken of the devastating loss of her baby son during a traumatic labour at 42 weeks pregnant.
Nicole Abernethy lost her son Steven in 2013 after being taken into hospital to be induced at several weeks overdue.
After labouring overnight, the next day Nicole, from Wallasey, was taken to a delivery suite in Arrowe Park Hospital where she was hooked up to a fetal heart monitor.
READ MORE: Woman's Aldi shop leads to '1 in 720 million' chance find
She said when the midwife told her they could only hear one heartbeat her "heart shattered into a million pieces" as she realised her baby son had died.
Nicole said: "Everything from there was a blur – I didn’t know what to do, what to think. I just wanted my poor boy in my arms."
Nicole had developed sepsis and pre-eclampsia while in labour and was rushed for a caesarean section where she gave birth to her "angel baby" Steven.
After the birth, during which Nicole says she "nearly actually passed away with him" she spent two days with her son in a cool cot at the Wirral hospital.
Nicole, who has a daughter, Irisha, who she says is her "world" spoke of how her son's death "changed everything."
She said: "It's utterly utterly heartbreaking losing a baby and it very definitely changes everything.
"You look at everything in your life differently, it has a major effect.
"I lost my son in 2013 and I've grown with my grief with Steven.
"I find it very tough around his birthday, at Christmas, around all those difficult times of the year and I look at my daughter and think she should have her brother with her.
"My son would be nine in February and I still live with the journey. It doesn't grow to you, you grow to it, it's hard to explain."
Nicole says that one of the ways she has processed her grief and the trauma of Steven's birth and death has been to find ways to help others who have experienced baby loss.
Shortly after losing her son, Nicole started fundraising for an additional cold cot at Arrowe Park Hospital.
She said: "When I was in the hospital with my son in the cool cot I was actually told that whilst I was there if another family lost a baby they would have to take the cool cot off me.
"That would have started the process of my son going through a post mortem sooner than I hoped.
"I was able to stay with him two days and I was lucky in that way. It did get to me the fact that I knew other parents might not be so lucky and would have their angel child taken off them before they were ready.
"In the subsequent weeks I started a fundraising campaign to raise enough for the hospital to buy an additional cool cot.
"I managed to do this and handed the money over the following year and the hospital were able to buy that initial cool cot.
"It was my way of grieving for Steven, to help the bereaved parents that have gone through or are going through the same thing that I did."
In 2018, after years spent working with wildlife rescue in Central Park, Wallasey, Nicole came up with the idea of an environmentally friendly way to memorialise babies who had been lost during Baby Loss Awareness week, which happens annually in October, and formed a charitable organisation Babyloss Awareness Memorial.
She said: "Over the years since the loss of Steven I've delved into charity work quite a lot and one side of it was doing animal rescue from local lakes, ponds, like Central Park lake.
"In the midst of doing all that, I actually saw first hand the damage that balloons and Chinese lanterns can cause to the animals.
"Some sights that I've seen I'd never want anyone else to see and it inspired me to try to find a way to be able to do a memorial in an environmentally friendly way.
"In 2018 I did quite a few rescues including swans, ducks - you name it I was a part of the rescue for them.
"I approached a local north west British marine diver to see if my idea was valid and whether it could work, he approved it and other rescuers approved it for me and Babyloss Memorial was then born."
Every year at the end of Babyloss Awareness Week on October 15, Nicole takes hundreds of names, hand written with edible ink on pieces of rice paper, of babies who have died, out on to the River Mersey.
She collects the names together throughout the year from parents who get in touch with her via the Babyloss Memorial website or on social media and releases the names on the ferry in a poignant ceremony that she records and shares with grieving parents around the world.
She said: "I take the names and I release them from the ferry into the River Mersey, it's poignant and to be honest I can't explain it to anybody but it is a lovely memorial."
"Sometimes, some of the emails I receive puts things into perspective.
"There is no comparison from one person's journey to another but when I see emails that have the names of six babies from one family, it really puts into perspective the pain many people are going through.
"I feel very luck I'm in the baby loss community and we support each other and I can do what I do to help others, but unfortunately at the same time, to be here now doing this, it cost me my son's life."
Nicole is currently working towards getting a leaflet about her babyloss memorial project included in memory boxes, which bereaved parents receive after their baby's death, in the hopes of reaching out to more families affected by the trauma of baby loss.
She says while her work with the memorial project is "emotional" she is happy to be able to help other bereaved families, and create a lasting legacy for her son.
She said: "Steven is on my mind every single day, having the charity is his memorial. I do it for him. It's emotional, but knowing what I'm doing helps others gets me through them difficult days."
Receive newsletters with the latest news, sport and what's on updates from the Liverpool ECHO by signing up here
