‘Hospital laid my dead baby in ice packs’: Mum’s stillborn horror
A grieving Queensland mum was forced to flip her stillborn baby on ice packs after a shortage of valuable equipment at a hospital was exposed. Now she shares her tragic story and how it sparked a quest to ensure it never happened again. WARNING: Distressing
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WARNING: Some images may be upsetting
Utter pain is etched into Aaron Harrison’s face as the lifeless body of his newborn daughter is handed to his devastated partner.
Sophie Judith was just alive and hiccupping as Nikki Hufton battled through painful labour contractions that very afternoon.
But by 6.30pm a “terrible feeling of dread” had echoed throughout Nikki’s body, prompting the Bahrs Scrub couple to rush to the Logan Hospital where an ultrasound confirmed the worst.
That’s when, Nikki says, they heard the “most heartbreaking words ever”: "I’m sorry. There’s no heartbeat”.
Then came the screaming.
Right: Nikki Hufton at her home in Bahrs Scrub, Logan. Picture: David Kelly
Inset: Nikki’s favourite thing to do was hold Sophie’s little hand. Picture: Marianne Wuthrich
“It was like an out of body experience. I heard this horrible cry. It was more like a screech,” Nikki says.
“Then, I was brought back to reality and realised it was me screaming.”
“I was asking the lady ‘how, how, how’ and saying ‘no, no’ … then I just sobbed until my face hurt.”
A few hours later, under the bright lights of the hospital’s operating theatre, Aaron, 33, and Nikki, 30, cling to faint hope the sonographers could be wrong.
That, when Sophie is born, they’ll hear a baby’s cry.
But, when the baby is delivered via caesarean at 1.25am August 10 – her due date – that cry never comes.
Later, Sophie’s sudden, unexpected in utero death was determined to stem from complications related to a Streptococcus B infection during Nikki’s third trimester of pregnancy.
As the bereft couple weep together over their stillborn daughter, a midwife retrieves four ice packs, each about the size of an A4 piece of paper.
She snaps the blocks to make them go cold and uses them to line the bottom of the plastic hospital bassinet, before tucking in a sheet and lying Sophie on top.
Cracking and flipping the ice packs has to be done every four hours, or as soon as the ice gets too warm, to prevent Sophie’s fragile body from “deteriorating”.
It’s a ritual Nikki hopes no other families ever have to endure.
In a nearby room, another grieving family is spending their fifth day with their stillborn son thanks to a cuddle cot – a cooling unit designed to look like a regular baby bassinette – while Nikki is informed a second cuddle cot sits broken in the hospital storage room.
Without the cot technology Aaron and Nikki end up having only about 34 hours with their daughter before her little body starts to deteriorate.
Shortly after the birth, the family is moved into a private room away from the cries of the fussy newborns in the maternity ward.
Sophie, who looks like she’s sleeping peacefully, is in the bassinette next to her mummy’s bed.
Nikki reaches over and holds her daughters tiny hand.
She was the little girl she had longed for and, as little sister to then almost 2-year-old Jaxon, was meant to complete their family.
For the next few hours the beauty therapist lulls in and out of sleep, in part thanks to the anaesthetic from the C-section.
Each time she wakes, she sees Aaron hovering over and talking to his little girl.
They can hold Sophie, but not for long each time.
The warmer she gets, the faster her little body will decompose, so she must stay on ice as much as possible.
“I felt so awful for Sophie, just lying there on ice,” Nikki says weeks later.
“I know that is all we had and there was nothing we could do about it.”
A snapshot in time
After family members and friends take turns nursing Sophie that morning, Aaron and Nikki realise time with their daughter has to be shortened as the ice packs were not sufficient for long-term preservation.
“I’d pick her up and cuddle her … You could see she was already deteriorating,” Nikki says.
“She was leaking out of her nose, her chest was sinking in. If she got warm, I’d put her back in (on the ice) after a cuddle.
“She was fading away too quickly and we didn’t want to have that image of her in our heads.
“Having the option of the cot would have been amazing as she was being passed around from person to person with all their body heat, so she would have cooled a lot quicker. Therefore, she would have looked healthier, if that makes sense,” she said.
Among those who later come to visit is Marianne Stokvold Wuthrich, a volunteer with Heartfelt Photography, an organisation of professional photographers dedicated to capturing compassionate family photos during the most traumatic time in a parent’s life.
Although she was unsure about the photo shoot, Nikki agreed to it for her mum who arranged it through the hospital.
Marianne, 49, says she personally understood and emphasised with Nikki’s initial hesitation.
She was only 25 when she and husband Clement, now 50, lost their first child, Sandra, at 26-weeks gestation in her home country of Norway.
To Marianne’s surprise, midwives gave the baby to her to hold and took a photo on a Polaroid camera, which she thought was odd at the time, but says it later became a treasured keepsake.
“Immediately I was very happy I got to hold her and then later I was realised how good that was. I felt like I had a baby,” she said.
“I felt like she actually was born, it was not just some fantasy fiction that may or may not have happened or a dream of something you know.”
The Kuraby resident says experience has shown her shocked parents are later grateful for the photographs.
“They are so overwhelmed because they don’t know they want them yet,” she explains.
Weeks later, Nikki admits she is incredibly thankful for those precious memories.
“I was very sceptical at first and worried about the photos, but they look amazing,” she says
.
Saying goodbye
Three months after losing Sophie, the new mum sits in her lounge room in front of a large TV with an affectionate, fluffy ragdoll cat named Jelly bean vying for attention.
A Paw Patrol-brand couch and a small plastic chair and table sit neatly in the corner.
Jaxon, who is at daycare, does not yet understand why the baby in his mummy’s tummy has disappeared or that his sisters ashes are kept inside a special Pink teddy bear.
“He has pointed to my belly and said ‘baby’, and I will take him to the cabinet, and he will say ‘Sophie baby’ and point at her teddy bear,” she says.
“We’re thankful he’s young because he knows how much Sophie is loved, but he won’t remember the heartbreak when he’s older.”
Saying goodbye to Sophie at the hospital by midday August 11 was incredibly difficult for Nikki and Aaron, a sales representative.
“That was one of the hardest bits, having to kiss her on the head and walk away,” Nikki said as she wiped away unabated tears.
“The realisations of being wheeled out of the hospital empty-handed really hit.
“Just having to say goodbye to her, knowing I can’t take her home with me, was heartbreaking.”
It hit again twofold when Nikki saw the empty baby car seat.
The mum still misses not being able to hold her daughter’s hand.
“I knew that she was gone but it was nice that I could reach over,” she said.
“That was the worst part of coming home, I couldn’t reach over anymore.”
“I didn’t want any other parents … having to flip bags of ice to keep their baby cool’’
A day after arriving home without their daughter, Nikki channelled her grief into fundraising $6,500 for a cuddle cot, with plans to donate it to the hospital.
“I didn’t want any parents going through the same thing of having to flip bags of ice to keep their baby cool,” she said.
As part of her efforts, Nikki contacted Bears of Hope, a pregnancy and infant loss support group that supplies the special cots around the nation.
The charity’s co-founder and chief executive officer, Amanda Bowles, was horrified upon hearing that Sophie had to be kept on ice because of the lack of working cuddle cots, especially as she had 12 sitting in a warehouse only a couple of hours drive south.
“In my experience (icepacks) are the best of bad options … but it’s an awful way to consider in this day and age, particularly when I have cuddle cots sitting here in a warehouse,” she said.
Amanda, 46, of Reedy Creek on the Gold Coast, said a cuddle cot was a cooling unit designed to look like a normal baby bassinette with a hood that could even be rocked like a regular cradle.
The not-for-profit organisation, which has provided hundreds of cuddle cots to hospitals around Australia, has since sent three of the special bassinettes to the Logan hospital following Aaron and Nikki’s experience.
“We had (other) families that fundraised for a cot and who were looking to donate theirs and other hospitals weren’t requiring them,” Amanda said.
“So, in talking with Logan about the sheer number of losses they experience there, we decided to send three.”
She said the use of the special cots meant families even had the option to take their infant home for a few days before their funeral.
“The cots are designed to preserve the deterioration of the body, to allow the family time with their baby, which is the one thing they really don’t have enough of,” Amanda says.
“Every time the baby is touched, the skin is really quite fragile, and deteriorates each time it’s moved.
“Traditionally, what would happen is the family would have the baby and they might be able to spend a moment with them and the baby would be taken to the morgue.”
Thanks to Bears of Hope sending the cots to the hospital, Aaron and Nikki instead donated theirs to Farewell Funerals in Meadowbrook, the small funeral home that handled Sophie’s cremation.
Capturing memories
Her long blonde hair tied back in a ponytail, Nikki’s face flickers between lighting up when talking about Sophie Judith, to her voice softening and cracking with emotion as the tears reappear.
“I love talking about her,” she says.
“Just like her Big Brother … Sophie had the most delicious red hair.”
Pulling out her phone, Nikki shows some photographs from a professional pregnancy shoot with Aaron and Jaxon when she was about 37 weeks pregnant, through to her own pictures of Sophie’s coffin – which they first took home to decorate.
Then, there are the final photos of Sophie during a viewing the day she was cremated.
A Disney fan, Nikki had dressed Sophie in a Dumbo the elephant outfit for her farewell.
“I love Disney and felt it fit well, with him being able to fly,” she explains.
A few weeks later, another photo is taken at their four bedroom home.
It should have been of Jaxon holding his baby sister on his second birthday.
Instead, it is of the red-headed toddler cuddling the Pink teddy bear he knows as Sophie.
He does not yet understand the bear holds the ashes of his baby sister.
“I wanted a photo of them together,” Nikki laments.
“One sentence could have saved her life”
Sophie’s death was preventable, the grieving mum claims, and occurred through a combination of missteps by people in the medical field.
In hindsight, Nikki says, had doctors throughout the nine months better educated her about the risks surrounding a Strep B infection in pregnancy – and had they recommended the baby be delivered early as a precaution because of those risks – she would have immediately abandoned her hopes for a natural delivery and agreed to be induced.
“If they had just given me options, knowing I was strep B positive, I would have taken the advice and let them break my waters immediately,” she said.
“A simple sentence could have potentially saved her life, I personally think.”
Being told days earlier ... over the phone that it “didn’t sound like she was in labour” and to not head to the hospital yet also contributed, Nikki alleges.
“I had been feeling Sophie kick and move and by Thursday, contractions had started.
“They were about 10 minutes apart. I called (the hospital) and asked if I should come in, but (they) said it did not sound like I was in labour so not to come in yet.”
“It turns out I really was in labour.”
PART TWO: ‘You cry a lot’: Inside the world of Qld’s most heart-wrenching job
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