What a wonderful start to 2016 – Sadie and Ross Newton have presented Petals with a cheque for £3,000 that was raised last year by Sadie’s parents through sponsorship for running the 2015 London Marathon.
Most importantly, this money was raised in memory of baby Dasie, who was stillborn at 33 weeks on 21st January 2015. Sadie and Ross initially attended Petals counselling to process the trauma of this devastating loss, and then to help them cope with a further pregnancy that brought high anxiety and a very stressful number of weeks. Thankfully, baby Barnaby arrived safely at 34 weeks in November 2015 – a little brother for 4 yr old Freddie.
We are so grateful that Sadie and Ross, and their families, have taken the time to support Petals in this way. We send a massive Petals THANK YOU to them all! :-)
The charity is reliant on funds such as these to be able to keep offering counselling to those who need it, and we appreciate every effort that anyone makes to contribute to the cause. Thank you!
Sadie and Ross’ story featured in the Cambridge News on January 25th, 2016, and the full story can be read here:
A couple who suffered huge heartache when their daughter was stillborn last year, have raised £3,000 for the charity that supported them through the trauma.Addenbrooke’s staff nurse Sadie Newton, 25, and her husband Ross, 24, of Red Lodge, donated the money to Petals in memory of their daughter Dasie who was born at 33 weeks.
Her parents Sarah, and Lawrence Catchpole raised the money by taking part in the London Marathon last April which they decided to run a year earlier than planned – and with little training – in Dasie’s memory.
Petals was a huge help to Sadie and Ross, who were devastated when their daughter Dasie was stillborn on January 21, last year.
The charity, which is based at Addenbrooke’s, offers a specialist counselling service for parents affected by things including stillbirth, neonatal death and miscarriage.
“It took a little while for it to sink in to be honest,” said Sadie, who works in trauma and orthopaedics at the hospital. “It was all really surreal. It was really traumatic and difficult. We’ve got a four-year-old as well. We were trying to make life as normal for him as we could. We found it quite difficult to let people in and help us, we shut ourselves away for a while.”
After Dasie was born, the hospital put the couple, who have another son, Freddie, 4, in touch with Petals and they started seeing having sessions a few weeks later. They desperately wanted to try for another baby and found just seven weeks later they were expecting one.
But after her experience with Dasie, Sadie found the pregnancy really hard, and she was constantly worried something bad was going to happen.
“She [their counsellor] said to us it can be quite difficult for couples that have had a stillborn if they fall pregnant very quickly it can be quite traumatic, but we were adamant,” she said. “We wanted another baby”.
“Just to know that how we felt was normal and we were not alone in how we felt. It’s always been much easier to speak to Karen [their counsellor] then it has to friends or family. We never wanted to worry them. My husband was doing a lot of looking after me, she [Karen] was making sure he was looked after as well and gave us advice on how to talk to our eldest son. That was another thing, how to explain to a four-year-old what we’ve been through.
“We fell pregnant just seven weeks after Dasie was still born and the pregnancy was absolutely terrifying”.
“I was admitted to hospital twice and Barnaby, our new baby was born six weeks premature and had a stay in the neonatal intensive-care unit (NICU).”
“And again, Karen, the founder of the charity was such a huge support.”
Last Thursday would have been Dasie’s first birthday, which Sadie said was always going to be a difficult time of year for them.
“I think of her every single day,” she added. “This time of year especially. It’s all just really bitter sweet. I would never have wished to have gone through what we did but at the same time we’ve got Barnaby. He would not have been here had we not gone through what we have.
“We knew we wanted to do something [to raise money], it helps us in a way to start telling people who knew us what happened.”
“By raising money it was a way of getting her memory out there and people understanding what had happened without having to have that conversation.”
https://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Couple-donate-3-000-Petals-memory-daughter-Dasie/story-28580092-detail/story.html
