A grieving mom has shared a clip she captured of herself heavily pregnant—not knowing just 24 hours later she would be waking up in hospital without her baby.
Hayley Wilkins (@hayley_glowup) posted the reel on Instagram two days overdue in January this year, when she was 40 weeks and 3 days pregnant, and couldn’t wait to meet her daughter.
The following day, Wilkins was having a casual conversation with a friend when her waters broke.
Excited, she texted friends and family to let them know that she had gone into labor.
Originally from the UK, the 40-year-old who works in content creation moved to Malaga, Spain during the COVID-19 pandemic, where she met her now partner.
Thankfully, her mom and best friend from home had just landed at the airport in Spain in time for the birth.
“Everything was fine, and then within the space of about 10 minutes, I was bleeding heavily,” Wilkins told Newsweek.
Wilkins also had her doula from England on the phone, who advised her and her partner to get to the nearest hospital.
After an internal scan, she was rushed into the operating room for an emergency C-section and was placed in a medically induced coma. When she woke up, she was faced with a heartbreaking reality.
“My partner was there and I looked at him and said, ‘Where is she?’ And I just looked at him and said, ‘She’s not OK, is she?’”
Sienna Elizabeth Rose O’Shea was delivered stillborn and Wilkins had almost lost her life during the emergency C-section, where her lung had collapsed.
While friends and family had flown into Spain to be there for the new parents, the thought of being in a world without her baby was too much for Wilkins.
“I just said, ‘Mom, please just get them to put me back to sleep. I don’t want to be here’,” she recalled.
Feeling a desperate need to hold her baby, Wilkins was then confronted with even more tragic news.
Cuddle cots—cooling devices which allow new parents to spend more time with their stillborn babies—are currently not common in Spanish hospitals, meaning Sienna had already been taken to the funeral directors.
As Wilkins still needed to be monitored, she was not allowed to leave the hospital in order to see her baby girl, so instead, she discharged herself after four days.
“I was so worried to see her, but when I walked into the chapel… I was like, ‘Oh my God, she was just so beautiful and perfect,’” Wilkins said. “It was like the happiest and saddest hour of my life.”
After returning to hospital for further checks, Wilkins found herself planning Sienna’s funeral the day after she finally got to hold her.
The funeral was surreal. “I just kept thinking, this can’t be happening to me,” Wilkins said. “I think it wasn’t until a few weeks after the funeral that it really hit me. I had family come over and once everyone left, it was just me and my partner at the house. That’s when you’re in a house full of funeral flowers, not congratulations flowers.”
The couple’s aim is to now ensure that no other family have to go through the same experience. They’ve set-up a GoFundMe page to provide the hospital she delivered at with a cuddle cot, as well as raise money to help others with funeral costs—and provide the hospital with boxes to support families in remembering their babies.
“I’ve had in my head that I wanted to make sure Sienna’s death wasn’t in vain; that there was a reason,” Wilkins told Newsweek. “The fundraising has been my biggest focus and it gives me purpose. It’s really taken off here.”
With the help of friends and family, Wilkins has organized a variety of fundraising events such as a live music event, a fashion show with a market raffle and a retreat day. A friend of hers is even running a marathon to raise further funds.
Wilkins has already raised nearly enough for three cuddle cots–which each cost around $2,500.
“It’s all going in the right direction, and I just hope I can really make some big changes here, not just with the cuddle cot, but hopefully educating hospitals on aftercare and just a bit of empathy,” Wilkins said.
She’s also found an online community of other moms who have been through the same heartbreaking experience.
“It’s such a lonely feeling,” she said. “You hear about being of the one percent that has stillborn baby and then when you’re the one percent, and you realize it’s a really freaking big group of women,” she said.
“Every day, I have a new mom reaching out to me, and I say I’m sorry we’re in this club. You find comfort in it but also you can’t get away from it.”
Wilkins told Newsweek that she’s doing everything in her power to keep her daughter’s legacy alive.
“She’s made such a big imprint on people’s lives already without even being here,” she added. “I just hope that Sienna creates something that’s massive and everybody knows her name.”
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